Clay Motley

“ However, the music and culture that created Rock n’ Roll, eventually paving the way for The Sex Pistols, very much believed in “sin”. In a sense, it is easier to rebel when there are no boundaries, no consequences, or “no future”, as The Sex Pistols repeat 17 times in their single, because there is little or nothing to lose. The musicians examined in this essay felt their “sinful” actions risked their eternal soul. ”

“ Elvis responded: “When I’m out there, I do what they want to hear; when I’m back here, I do what I want to do”, which resulted in the gospel singer and the rocker nearly coming to blows ( [60] , p. 81) . Elvis’s dichotomy of stage/backstage and secular/sacred was an attempt to balance his Rock n’ Roll career while still maintaining his religious faith and identity. Despite these efforts, Elvis was clearly troubled throughout his life with the religious implications of his career and lifestyle. ”

“ In a song barely over three-minutes long, Patton points toward his un-named sensual desire no less than seven times. In sound and lyrics, the song paints the picture of a man exploding with energy to do everything the law and church will not allow.
Because the blues defied the demands of the local church to avoid the sinful, “secular” pleasures of the world, it came to be known as the “Devil’s music.” Angela Davis writes that “black consciousness” in this period, “interpreted God as the opposite of the Devil, religion as the not-secular, and the secular as largely sexual. ”

“ This discussion of the blues will be limited to rural blues musicians of the very early twentieth century who, in the words of Charles Reagan Wilson while describing Charley Patton, “came as close as anyone to defining a new art form, the blues, out of the folk ingredients of African American music in the Delta” ( [9] , p. 119) . Unfortunately, our modern perception of the blues has been excessively shaped by folklorists like Alan Lomax and the efforts of the 1960s “folk revivalists” who brought attention to blues musicians fitting their notions of pre-modern, un-commercial “folk” artists. ”

“ Being Christ-haunted like the many Southern musicians examined in this essay was not pleasant, and it was often personally destructive to the musicians and those around them. However, artists often turn tensions into creativity, and the same is true for the rural, Southern folk musicians who were caught between their “sacred” background and their new “secular” profession and yearning. Of course, Rock n’ Roll continued to be creative, exciting, and important after it was no longer necessarily associated with its Southern roots and any religious context. ”

“ By that point, “the devil” had become a trope to cultivate a menacing aura for the band, which is lucrative in a genre where rebellion is precious. Not so with the “Christ-haunted” musicians explored in this essay, for whom the devil was a matter of great concern. They could be said, in a sense, to have “sympathy for the devil”, in that they took the devil seriously. For better or worse, they created their music within the cultural constraints of their evangelical Protestant culture. ”

“ Not only did the blues first take recognizable form in and around the Mississippi Delta at the turn of the century, but these religious tensions are most pronounced in the lives and music of the earliest professional blues musicians. As the blues moved from its rural roots to urban areas, such as Memphis, Chicago, and Detroit, the “Christ-haunted” features became less pronounced. This fits the well-defined dynamic that homogenous, rural societies tend to hold on to religious beliefs and other cultural practices more staunchly than the more heterogeneous and mutable urban ones [28] . ”

“ Southern hedonism does not typically function as a rebellion against the church—it is not a rival set of moral values or a challenge to God’s authority. Rather, “sinful” behavior is fully recognized as such by the “sinner”. Rock n’ Roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis alludes to Luke 16:13 when he declared, “I’m draggin’ the audience to hell with me. How am I gonna git ‘em to heaven with [the song] ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’? You can’t serve two masters; you’ll hate one an’ love the other” ( [24] , p. 245) . ”

“ This dynamic did not afflict every blues musician during the genre’s formative years in the early twentieth century, but it is an unmistakable and influential tension affecting much of the earliest blues musicians.
Despite the posthumous mythology of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the Devil, in reality there are few, if any, instances where a bluesman made a clean break with his or her religious faith, permanently casting a lot “with the Devil” or the “secular” world of blues and juke joints. ”

“ Rebellion is by definition oppositional, seeking to resist or replace the existing order. When The Who’s “My Generation” shocked mainstream sensibility in 1965 with the lyric, “Hope I die before I get old” [3] , the band was voicing the growing postwar sentiment that their elders’ beliefs were utterly bankrupt. In 1974, musician Frank Zappa captured Rock n’ Roll’s iconoclastic tendencies by declaring with approval that the electric guitar, “can be the single most blasphemous device on the face of the earth” ( [4] , p. 43) . ”

“ In a society that defined “secular” pleasures of the flesh as sinful, the blues often reveled in the pleasures of this world, in terms of its lyrics, the lives of blues musicians, and the sensuous atmosphere of the juke joints. ”

“ This resulted in an intense focus on rural, acoustic, male blues guitarists, to the detriment of the urban “Blues Queens” of the 1920s, commercial-minded composers like W.C. Handy, and urban musicians, who did not fit the revivalists’ interests in re-discovering a music which gave voice to an oppressed people. I fully recognize the diversity and breadth of styles and artists that contribute to the multi-faceted genre called “the blues”, and I do not wish to add to the perception that the history of the blues is the history of the rural bluesmen of the Mississippi Delta. ”

“ Blues music developed as the music of Saturday night, performed in the free time and place when African Americans in the Jim Crow South could express themselves in ways discouraged or impossible in other spaces. ”

“ Being a blues musician was in itself an act of resisting the neo-slavery labor system in the South, since blues musicians could avoid the hard physical labor that was the lot of most African Americans during this period. ”

“ The church is committed to the eternal salvation of the soul after death, which is both final and inevitable. Human existence is only a brief sojourn in a vale of trials, troubles, and tribulations to be endured because it is the will of the Creator, whose ways are mysterious” ( [18] , p. 38) . ”

“ Although House’s formal career as a preacher ended, he spoke of his religious faith throughout his long life, despite continuing his career as a bluesman. Even nearly four decades after House preached his last official sermon, he would give long monologues during live performances where he: “often lamented the sinfulness of the music he sang, and how the blues had become his calling rather than the ministerial career to which he had once aspired . ”

“ While the commercial nature of the country music industry—led by major Northern record labels from its beginnings in the early 1920s—would have stifled country musicians’ ability to write songs expressing their Christ-haunted struggles, the artists themselves would not have wanted to even if they could. ”

“ Although institutional racism and segregation during the Jim Crow era separated Southern blacks and whites, especially when worshiping, both black and white working-class Southerners shared many important religious beliefs. ”

“ Before analyzing specific country musicians, it is important to note that the musicians examined below are male singers because the culturally conservative country music industry did not allow for individual female stars until after the scope of this study. ”

“ In a very rural, relatively isolated society in terms of media and travel, where the church was the absolute social and moral authority, secular and sensual sentiments expressed in blues songs were very transgressive and alluring. ”

“ As they sang his gospel hit “I Saw the Light”, surely calculated by Pearl to help Williams resist his urge to drink, he turned to Minnie and said: “Minnie, I don’t see no light. There ain’t no light” ( [62] , p. 156) .
5. Conclusions
By the mid-1950s, blues, country, and the postwar youth culture were coalescing into the new musical genre that came to be known as Rock n’ Roll. “ [Rock n’ Roll] was a genre in its own right, associated with a new matrix of musical sounds, and a new cluster of emblematic cultural values” ( [4] , p. 97) . ”