The Sacred and the Secular: Murry Hammond’s “I Don’t Know Where I’m Going but I’m On My Way”
October 19, 2011
Some time ago, my friend Matt and I walked a stretch of train tracks to an old railroad bridge. It was around 10:30 at night. We planned on hopping a train and riding it the 15 miles or so back to his house. I carried a guitar while he toted a pouch full of supplies for recording and documenting our experience.
We came to the bridge, black beams and rusted iron rising perhaps 15 or 20 feet above the ground. We slipped on gravel and clutched at beams as we moved downward, toward our hiding place under the bridge. There was graffiti on the iron, and bits of litter and bottles among the overgrowth. We waited for perhaps an hour. I walked in circles, fingerpicking and singing old train songs. Soon after, we heard it: a lonesome whistle, somewhere in the near distance. Matt strapped the guitar to his back. We stood on the graveled slope and watched. There were more whistles, closer now. After maybe 20 minutes, we saw it, speeding towards us. We raced back to our hiding place. We crouched low. The sound grew louder and louder. The bridge began to vibrate. And then…a mighty roar as the great machine raced by, mere feet above us.
When the engine had passed, we ran up the slope and down the line of trains. They sped past us, one after another. I had never been so close to a speeding train before. I stood frail against an uncompromising force. The noise it made was like heavy wind and thunder. You had to yell to speak over it. For a moment, probably much longer, I was terrified.
The last car sped past and we began running after it, at full sprint, but it was too fast. We stood on the tracks, catching our breath, as the train disappeared into the night, a fading red light.
For some time after, I thought about the great and terrifying locomotive and its place in the history of gospel music. I had never taken the words as sincerely as I did on that particular night, where the great power rushed before my eyes like the angels of Revelation. Many of those old songs recall the wrath and power of God breaking into our lives, whether we like it or not, drawing us into His reign, or leaving us along the tracks.
Murry Hammond, in his record, I Don’t Know Where I’m Going But I’m On My Way, continues those gospel traditions, often drawing upon the history of sacred music, chronicling various riders on their paths to heaven or elsewhere. It’s not exactly a gospel record. Not everyone chooses heaven in the end. But for some of these lost travelers, a light does appear around the bend. A faith is rewarded.
The album opens quietly, with the soft, pulsating strums of Hammond’s guitar, emerging as if out of darkness. His voice, awash in reverb, soon follows.
What are they doing in heaven today?
he asks, not as Washington Phillips once did, with hints of joy, but as if the possibility of heaven is the only hope for a life marred with tribulation.
I’m thinking of friends that I used to know,
No longer living in this world below.
I’ve heard about heaven but I want to know
Oh what are they doing right now?
Hammond follows a road first paved by the Carter Family, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and the mountain musicians before them. He interprets old songs and sings new ones that sound old. When writing, he adopts ancient idioms. His words, his patterns of language, like those of the old songs, are peculiar and often ambiguous. The sounds of the record, the echo of his voice, the drone of his harmonium, are as ghostly and as mysterious as the mountains that first gave birth to the tradition.
Hammond, like the Carters, like Williams and Cash, is a man who stands in two worlds: the sacred and the secular. He earns a living playing bass for the rock/alt-country group, Old 97’s, who specialize in songs about love, relationships, and yes, sex; and he is a committed Christian, attending church in Burbank, California when he can, singing of salvation often, and struggling, as we all do, to look Godward.
Of his faith, he says, “I was one of the ones that you might say was ‘cornered’, where I felt like God was trying to get my attention. He got it, and it came during a time of a particular valley I was in. Even now that’s often how I get steered back into ‘the fold’ as it were, when I wander off and am in need of a re-pointing of my compass”.
Hammond, a native Texan, was born into the Southern Christian tradition. His mother and father were both devout and deeply spiritual. Prone to wanderlust at a young age, he fought against their beliefs with much energy, but with little success. His journey of faith hasn’t been a straightforward path. It has been, like the trains he so frequently sings about, full of sharp curves and dead ends. It has moved through deep valleys and traversed cliff walls. It has seen pitch-black nights with only dim lantern light to see by. But through every misstep and back step, through every dark night, he has emerged again, wiser and stronger and further enveloped in the great mystery.
As for living and working in the secular world, he says, “There certainly is a lot of opportunity for vice in rock and roll and I tend to give in to some of it, and other times shake myself out of it and look deeper, and higher. The equation is an age-old one: the more worldly I live, the more unhappy and complicated my world gets. Conversely, the higher I shoot, and the more I cling to a universal love, the happier I am and the better I treat people”.
Though not always autobiographical, there are pieces of Hammond in each of his characters. They are all on various tracks, searching hard for something elusive or hidden, whether it be God or love or home or the unknown. He has longed for each of these at some point in his life, and somehow found a few of them.
In the song, “Next Time, Take the Train”, Hammond sings,
Throw it wide and see no end,
Let no one fence or cage you in,
And realize where you have been, and why.
The traveller speaks of finding that place between where you’ve come from and where you’re going. It is in this space that Hammond himself has found clarity. He embraces the places and people that brought him here. He embraces the faith that revived him, again and again. But he is still intrigued and ever excited about the concept of the unknown before him.
* * *
Matt and I walked the tracks until 1:30 in the morning, waiting for another train to pass, but nothing ever came. We talked about the past and the future for hours; the places we came from and the places ahead. Driving home, I listened to I Don’t Know Where I’m Going But I’m on my Way. The train had long rode on. The world had grown quiet. I parked the car and turned to the album’s final track, a song about heaven:
I’m gonna sail on across the wide river
Where my Lord has gone on before.
Where the long look behind turns to family there gathered,
To meet, and to part, no more.
I too grew anxious for that unknown.
Information was gathered through an interview I conducted with Murry Hammond.
This Side of Heaven: Johnny Cash’s “My Mother’s Hymn Book”
September 20, 2011
I remember crying when Johnny Cash died. Not at first. I spent the morning in a sort of impassive state, travelling from school building to school building as if the world were an unfamiliar place. I was at college, living alone in a dorm at Kent State. I had come downstairs to the lobby and if I remember right, Cash was playing through the speakers, on the radio. When I heard it, I knew that something was wrong. I knew that Johnny Cash wouldn’t be on the radio on any normal day. Sure enough, when the song ended, the deejay announced that the man in black had died.
It was a Friday. Soon after, I ate and went to class. I floated across the sidewalks. I was quiet and blank. After class had let out, I gathered my stuff, got in my car and headed home for the weekend. I put the Johnny Cash mix I had compiled of my favorite songs into the CD player. A few songs in, before I had reached the interstate, perhaps at “Big River”, I started bawling.
Though there were many sides to Cash, there are two that stand out distinctly for me. The first is of the legend, the larger than life icon who sang of murder and sin with complete conviction. He was a man, no, a mythological creature, who burned down forests in stoned rampages. This Cash is universally known and worshipped as a rock star. The monument of this Cash will tower over the world until there is no world.
The second side is smaller, less distinct, but probably more accurate. This Cash was warm, thoughtful, and deeply spiritual. He collected books on theology. He made frequent trips to the Holy Land, studying the ancestors of his faith. Those closest to him testify of this Cash and it was this Cash, who, near the end of his life, laid aside his black coat, his legend, and recorded what I believe to be one of his greatest contributions to American music, My Mother’s Hymn Book.
Cash had recorded a number of gospel records over his long career, but the 15 songs of My Mother’s Hymn Book (a collections of gospel standards like “I’ll Fly Away” and “Softly and Tenderly”) can be traced back to his earliest memories. They are songs that gave strength to the Cash family as they toiled in the cotton fields of Arkansas. They are what shaped the young J.R. into the booming singer that he would become. And they are songs that Cash drew upon when he found himself in the lowest depths of his addictions.
Come home, come home
You who are weary, come home…
I can imagine him, in his darkest hours, when voice and body were wrecked, recalling those words.
…Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling,
Calling, O sinner, come home.
Cash’s drug problems have been reiterated often. After making a name for himself at Sam Phillips’s Sun Studio, Cash moved to Columbia Records and very quickly became a megastar. To endure the long hours of touring and recording, he began taking amphetamines. The pills wrecked havoc on his mind and body. He grew agitated and restless. His frame became gaunt, his eyes sunken.
The deeper he sank into his addiction, the more unstable his behavior became. In 1965, he famously busted the stage lights of the Grand Ole Opry with his microphone stand. Upon walking offstage, he met the Opry’s manager, who politely asked him never to return.
Cash’s life continued its long spiral downward until, in 1967, he decided to crawl into the bowels of NIckajack Cave, in Tennessee, and await death. For hours he moved deep into the labyrinth of tunnels, until the batteries of his flashlight died and the darkness overtook him. He recalled in his book, “Cash: A Biography”, that as he was laying there,
I felt something very powerful start to happen to me, a sensation of utter peace, clarity, and sobriety. I didn’t believe it at first. I couldn’t’ understand it. How, after being awake for so long and driving my body so hard and talking so many pills-dozens of them, scores, even hundreds- could I possibly feel all right? The feeling persisted, though, and then my mind started focusing on God…I became conscious of a very clear, simple idea: I was not in charge of my destiny. I was not in charge of my own death. I was going to die at God’s time, not mine. I hadn’t prayed over my decision to seek death in the cave, but that hadn’t stopped God from intervening.
In complete darkness, perhaps hundreds of yards, perhaps a mile, deep inside a maze of caverns, he somehow, miraculously, crawled back out.
He would continue to struggle with his addictions for years afterward, but through war and through battle, his faith would once again be restored, helped along by little miracles.
One such miracle happened in New York, probably sometime in the 1970s, when he and June Carter walked past First Baptist Church. They decided to enter when somewhere in the congregation, a young voice shouted, “JOHNNY CASH! Johnny Cash has come to church with me! I told you! I told you he was coming!”
The young boy, mentally disabled, had told everyone earlier that Johnny Cash would be coming with him to church that day.
Cash wasn’t shy when it came to his faith. He wrote a book about Paul, whose conversion he identified with. He made a movie about Jesus, whose life he tried, and often failed, to emulate. “Walk the Line” sort of downplayed this side of his life, in favor of the legend. Nickajack Cave isn’t even mentioned (which I always found odd, being that it’s such a cinematic event). But there’s no doubt, from what he’s written in both his autobiographies, that God, the God of his mother, the God of his youth, was the ultimate redeemer of his brokenness. And it was to this God, and of this God that he sang in My Mother’s Hymn Book. Only this time, he had been around long enough to know the seriousness of the words.
I’m sort of ambivalent about many of the later records Cash recorded for American Recordings. A lot of the songs are crowded with instruments and guest stars, where few are needed; and they seem to perpetuate the myth of Cash. I suppose that’s why I’m drawn to My Mother’s Hymn Book, where the myth is forsaken. The producer, Rick Rubin, and the engineer, David Ferguson, are doing what musicologists like Alan Lomax and John Cohen and Mike Seeger did in the middle of the century. They are capturing an important voice before it’s gone; documenting a musical tradition before it is lost to history. The only things we hear on the record are the simple strums of Cash’s guitar, and a voice that still booms like thunder; that says, with all certainty,
Though all hell assail me, I shall not be moved.
Of the 40 plus albums that Cash recorded over his life, he called this one his favorite. He sings from a worn book of hymns that his mother passed on to him. He sings of the faraway shore and of life eternal. He sings not as the legend or as the undying outlaw, but as a man humbled and frail before his God, the weight of death and glory on his shoulders.
I think it was this Cash that I cried for so many years ago. It was this human Cash that I understood.
Information gathered from Cash’s two autobiographies, “Man In Black” and “Cash: the Autobiography”, as well as the liner notes to My Mother’s Hymn Book.
It Shall Not Approach You: Doug Burr’s “The Shawl”
September 2, 2011
The other night I was driving through Canton, Ohio. The sun was nearly down. Headlights appeared and swerved. The McKinley Monument moved in and out of trees.
I listened to Doug Burr’s The Shawl as I drove. I grew still. I felt strangely connected to the many lives travelling beside me, ahead of me, behind me, into the dying night. Existential questions concerning life and light, pain and turmoil, washed over me, and as cars and lives raced around me, I felt no sense of aloneness.
The nine songs of The Shawl are fierce Biblical psalms that Burr put to instrumentation. They are mostly obscure, overlooked among David’s more familiar pleas for deliverance. The words are at times reverential, at times bleak, as the psalmist, as Burr, achingly calls out to God and awaits His answer.
Return O’ Lord, rescue my soul;
Save me because of Thy loving kindness.
So arose his lamenting voice as I sped forward, flashing red lights lighting up the sky ahead of me. In the glow of those lights, in the unknown misery that lay beneath them, the sadness of the psalms, the melancholy, became like fire again, as if the words had been frozen for some time, or lay dormant in a long hibernation.
Burr told me that the project began in his little girl’s bedroom. At night, when he had run out of songs to sing her to sleep, he would build new songs out of the psalms. After a few years, when he had some downtime between projects, he began to take the idea more seriously.
In June of 2008, he and a group of musicians met at Texas Hall in Tehuacana, a partly dilapidated structure that had been built in the late 1800s to house Trinity University. It had seen many years of use, slowly suffering the same fate as every other human thing: that of deterioration. The photograph on the album’s cover tells much of its story: peeling paint, boarded windows, broken floorboards. But there is light, a powerful white light bursting through the windows. And there is life. It’s in the bitter, terrifying, triumphant words of the psalms, and in the heartbreaking delivery of Doug Burr, as he embodies the cries of the broken.
Burr is no stranger to issues of brokenness, or of deterioration. He has grappled with the mysteries of darkness for many years. “I’ve always been fairly obsessed with the idea of death and the afterlife…I don’t care much about things that don’t deal with more than one layer of this existence”. In college, when those around him were concerned with having fun and living life, Burr was silently wrestling with mortality and what he calls, “the triviality of life”. He had always been sensitive to such things. At that very transitional point in his life, he became somewhat paranoid, scavenging the bleak, ignored corners of the psyche, questioning the morality of existence, asking, as the sacred harpist, “Am I born to die?”
Through prayer, through scripture, through the love and support of his wife, whom he met towards the end of his college days, he slowly came to terms with the darkness, finding some peace in the restorative promises of God.
Burr has drawn upon this darker, more introspective side throughout his career as a singer/songwriter. He has continuously chronicled the murkier regions of the human experience, as well as the gray areas that lie where the spirit and flesh collide. Though explicitly Biblical, the Shawl is no leap heavenward for Burr. Many of the psalms were written in hours of darkness, at a very human level. The psalmist could very easily stand next to many of Burr’s own embattled characters. But interspersed among their sad utterances, among his tales of sin and consequences, are glimpses of hope, emerging as light through a window.
Burr and his band recorded the songs over a 27-hour period, with little sleep and little rest. Most of the album was recorded live, with some additional instrument tracks added toward the 27th hour, and with the exception of the final track, “In the Lord I Take Refuge”, which Burr recorded without accompaniment. The sound of birds chirping in the background, moving through rafters, he sings,
“…For behold, the wicked bend the bow,
They make ready the arrow
upon the string,
To shoot in darkness at the
upright in heart.
If the foundations are destroyed,
What can the righteous do?”
It is a sentiment as disheartening as the dying walls of Texas Hall. But Doug doesn’t languish on that thought for long. Though his voice is still weary, he sings in triumph,
The upright will see His face.
Information was gathered through an interview I conducted with Doug Burr.
I’m laying on my bed, listening to Sister Gertrude Morgan. Really, how can I be laying down under such insistence that I do something? “Let us make a record”, she shouts as her tambourine rattles and crashes. “Don’t you want to make a record?” she intones. “Prophet Isaiah made a record! Ezekiel made a record! Peter made a record!”
A record for Sister Morgan is heavier and higher than any piece of scratched vinyl or mere compact disc. Making a record is getting your hands dirty. Making a record is standing on street corners, taking in strangers, and bringing about God’s holy kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
The fourteen songs of “Let’s Make a Record” are the only known recordings of the enigmatic street missionary. They are bare and unadorned. It’s just her and her tambourine, but with every striking word, with every shake of her tambourine, she consumes her listener in a great, righteous fire. In the liner notes to the album, the writer says that Sister Gertrude “battered Time itself with rhythms that intensified as the spirit took her”.
Some of her words are improvised, appearing as her tambourine, as perhaps even God, dictates. Some of the words are ancient and have been drifting in and throughout spiritual music since the days of slavery, taking on new contexts with each succeeding generation. She sings of John and his revelation. She sings of Christ, the living bread. She sings of Power.
Oftentimes, mid-song, Sister Morgan will start into a sermon: “So let us humble ourselves, dear ones, get ready for the new world. Prepare yourself to live in that holy city. That same city, that same kingdom, that Jesus was talking to His disciples about when He left them, gone on back to His Father. Don’t forget it! Amen!”
She became a familiar presence in New Orleans in the 1940s and beyond, easily recognized by her white nurse’s uniform (she was nurse to Dr. Jesus) and her unpolished, detailed paintings of Christ and the creatures of Armageddon that she created as visuals for her sermons. Standing on street corners, dressed in perfect white, holding up paintings or playing her guitar, she would preach from Revelation; a mysterious figure with a mysterious past.
William A. Fagaly, in his book on Sister Morgan (Tools of Her Ministry) writes that she was “the seventh child of Frances and Edward Williams, born on Saturday, the seventh day of the week, on April 7, 1900 in Lafayette, Chambers County, Alabama”. She was married for about ten years beginning in 1928, but strangely parted from her husband around 1937. This might of had something to do with the transforming revelations she was intermittently experiencing. In December of 1934, while alone in her kitchen, she heard the voice of God tell her, “I’ll make thee as a signet for I have chosen thee”. Three years later, around the time of her separation from her husband, she heard the same voice say, “Go-o-o-o-o, Preacher, tell it to the World”. She followed this voice to Opelika and Mobile, Alabama; and eventually to New Orleans, where she would spend the last 41 years of her life.
In New Orleans, she floated throughout the city, preaching and playing guitar on the streets of the French Quarter, taking in runaways and orphans as a missionary in Lower Gentilly. After a few years, she opened the Everlasting Gospel Mission in the Lower Ninth Ward, a white house of peeling paint and red brick surrounded by a lawn of four-leaf clovers.
Inside the mission, you would find rooms coated in white paint or blanketed in white fabric, symbols of purity. After being told in a revelation that she was the bride of Christ, she thereafter wore only white and decorated her home in white as a living example of her purity.
Hanging on the walls of her mission, sitting in corners, propped up on furniture, you would find blocks of wood, pieces of cardboard, Styrofoam trays painted over with Sister Morgan’s scenes of destruction and restoration. Scores of angels drift across her canvases. Winged beasts snarl and howl. Great buildings of the New Jerusalem rise and shine like gold. Scribbled sermons and verses fill every blank spot. And amid the chaos, there is usually a painted Sister Morgan, holding a Bible, or a guitar, or clutching the hand of Jesus; or soaring over the mess in an airplane, her bridegroom beside her, steering. “Jesus is my airplane”, she so often etched into her works in crude ballpoint letters.
Sister Morgan is probably known more for her paintings than for her music. It was through an art dealer named Larry Borentstein that she became somewhat famous throughout the art world as a relevant and honest folk artist. He opened his studio to the missionary, selling her works and giving her a corner to sing and play guitar. He is also the man responsible for organizing the recording of “Let’s Make a Record”.
I know of few recordings more captivating. There is true power in her words and delivery. She has convinced me that though the Church might require two or more believers, gospel music can be ferocious and mighty with only one intense voice.
Sister Morgan died in 1981 and now lies silent in an unmarked grave. Those who knew her recognized that she inhaled and exhaled the Holy Spirit with every breath. They say she never had conversations. She spoke only in sermons. When listening to her recordings, I remember that. I remember that the only thing that differentiates her songs from the rest of her life was a jangling rhythm…although, as I think about it more closely, I wouldn’t be surprised if her entire life wasn’t lived to something resembling a tambourine beat.
As for me, it’s time to get up. It’s time to do something.
Information was gathered from William A. Falgaly’s book, Tools of Her Ministry
and the liner notes to Let’s Make a Record
From Tom Petty to Jesus
August 15, 2011
It all started in Middle School. That’s when my musical identity first took shape. Before then, I don’t remember ever loving music. There were certain songs that shook me up a little bit, but nothing that unsettled my very foundations. My musical interests consisted of whatever trends were spreading through elementary school, which would explain my cd collection: Mariah Carey, Ace of Base, the Bodyguard soundtrack and Kris Kross.
The big bang of my musical evolution began when I purchased Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers” in 7th grade. I had watched the video for “You don’t know how it feels” earlier that morning on VH1, the one where they distort the word “joint” so that it sounds like “nowng”. I liked the song and decided I would buy the album. This was no small feat in those days. It took weeks, possibly a month or so, to accumulate enough money to purchase a cd. If I made a mistake, if the album didn’t hold up, the blow would be devastating.
I bought the cd at the now defunct Phar-Mor. In the ensuing weeks, it would be all I listened to. For me, it opened up new realms of hearing and perceiving. The feedback of the guitars. the lilting vocals, the backwoods lyrics; they stirred in me a strange feeling of nostalgia for a time and place I had never visited. I felt as if Tom and his band would have been at home at my grandpa and grandma’s house in the late 1970s, hanging out with my uncles, drinking beer in the garage, playing music too loud.
For the next year, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were all I listened to. To raise enough money to purchase their greatest hits, I spent an entire Saturday dressed as a giant Lucky the Leprechaun, walking around K-Mart, handing out coupons for Lucky Charms. The weight of the massive head pressing on my shoulders was nearly unbearable. The humility was excruciating. But it was worth it in the end.
In 9th grade, the box set “Playback” was released, a six cd retrospective on the band. To get me to play basketball my freshman year, my mom promised to buy me four cds at the end of the season. I saved allowances, hoarded Christmas gift cards and endured an entire basketball season, all for the sake of the Heartbreakers.
You may scoff. You may lecture me on the irrelevance of rock songs about girls; but Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were torchbearers of traditional rock and roll, picking up where the Beatles and the Bryds had left off. And besides, it was Tom Petty that eventually led me to Bob Dylan, and Bod Dylan who more or less led me to everything else.
Petty and Dylan were fellow Wilburys and tour mates. For those reasons alone, I supposed he must hold some significance. I naively waded into the Dylan pool through a library copy of his MTV Unplugged album, but quickly retreated back to my beloved Heartbreakers, as a scared child to his mother. His voice was nasal and course. It sounded broken or cracked. Slightly traumatized, I gradually recovered and tried again when my dad rented Dylan’s Bootleg Series: Volumes 1-3 from the same library. Now we were getting somewhere.
Here was a young man in full control of his unpolished voice. Here was a kid almost, a revolutionary, rallying against corruption and greed and evil (I was a Dylan novice remember, and a freshman in high school, so it would be some time before I understood the complex relationship Dylan had to the late 1960s, as well as his bitter divorce from the era in the form of “Another Side of Bob Dylan”, “Bringing it all Back Home” and especially, “Highway 61 Revisited”).
The song from the bootleg series that probably resonated with me most was a short, simple sketch called “Man on the Street”. The song consists of only 2 chords, G and E minor, but the story of a dead stranger on the side of the road whom everyone either ignores or coldly disregards stirred in my mind a desire to oppose hypocrisy of all kinds (plus, I’ve always been a sucker for a well placed minor chord).
Throughout high school, Dylan usurped Petty’s role as the preeminent musical influence in my life. Where Petty had taught me how to sing, Dylan inspired me to pick up a guitar and write (though that would come much later). And whereas Petty encompassed the entirety of my musical attention in his day, Dylan opened me up to the diversity of American music. I journeyed across the lineage of artists and genres that had influenced Dylan in the formation of his identity; surreal folk ballads that had travelled from Scotland to the Untied States and that had been rewritten in the mountains of Appalachia; mournful blues laments that began on southern street corners and followed the length of the Mississippi upward; and, my favorite, magnetic gospel shouts that had set fire to the cotton fields of southern plantations and had rattled the walls of southern churches.
And not only that, but I discovered the wealth of influenced artists that Dylan had left in his wake. He changed the rules of music forever. We are all connected to his art in some way.
If you were to chart my musical evolution and compare it to other aspects of my teenage to adulthood development (say, using a line graph for example), you might find similar patterns of growth (with occasional back and sidesteps) in my spiritual evolution. Though I’ve by no means reached adulthood in my faith, I feel like I’ve come a long way since my high school days. The last ten years especially have been a time of progression, revelation, regression, deterioration, revaluation, and rebirth.
For most of those challenging years, I found little consolation in mainstream Christian music (to be fair, I’m not here to put down the metropolis that is CCM. Many people have been replenished and nudged heavenward through the musicians working in that particular genre of music. I want to tread lightly and hopefully not throw judgments upon fellow believers, or tear them down for having different musical standards than me). It’s just that most of mainstream Christian music didn’t speak to me personally or set me aflame as the gospel I heard in old field recordings, or in the brimstone voice of Johnny Cash. And the more I travelled the path that had started with Tom Petty and that had erupted with Bob Dylan, the more I discovered deeper and graver and profounder Christ-centered music.
The essays that will appear in this column in the ensuing months will be written so that I may pass on to others artists and albums that have illuminated my own faith walk. Some will be obscure and nearly forgotten. Some will be underground and worthy of attention. Some will be washed in static. Some will be washed in noise and feedback. All, hopefully, will have been washed in the blood.
let us make a record 