Bad Livers
This summer the Nashville-based Gospel Music Association revamped its standards for the Dove Awards, the Christian recording industry’s equivalent of the Grammys. Previously the only prerequisite for nomination was that one’s record be sold in Christian music stores, but apparently the GMA was disturbed that some product distributed that way, while “inspirational and/or wholesome,” was not sufficiently Christian. From now on, it announced in July, gospel shall be considered music in any style whose lyric is “substantially based on historically orthodox Christian truth contained in or derived from the Holy Bible; and/or an expression of worship of God or praise for His works; and/or testimony of relationship with God through Christ; and/or obviously prompted and informed by a Christian world view.”
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In his 1997 book, Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity, Bruce Bawer argues that fundamentalist Protestantism gives religion in general–and Christianity in particular–a bad name. He simplifies a distinction between true spiritualism and “legalistic” Christianity that was first made by Paul Tillich, who, when he died in 1965, was the John Nuveen Professor of Theology and Culture at the University of Chicago. In the anthology Theology of Culture, which collects 40 years’ worth of his ideas on the religious dimension in cultural activity, Tillich defines true spirituality as “ultimate concern,” and says it is “manifest in the aesthetic function of the human spirit.” The role of religion, he says, is to “open up the depth of spiritual life which is usually covered by the dust of our daily life and the noise of our secular work.”
Still, it’s frustrating that the well-oiled machinery for moving millions of gospel units will never even encounter Dust on the Bible, while Touch and Go’s well-oiled machinery for delivering independent-minded rock music is as limited in its ability to reach gospel’s masses as Thrill Jockey is in its ability to make Freakwater into country-radio stars. Meanwhile, folks seeking good music with religious content could wander 40 years in the wilderness trying to find it.
No tradition is more strongly established in bluegrass than gospel. In Bluegrass: A History, which many consider the bible of the genre, author Neil V. Rosenberg says early bluegrass records and songbooks contained about 30 percent religious songs, though a smaller proportion of such music was included in broadcasts and performances. He points out that Bill Monroe never failed to perform at least one gospel song, and that on Sundays he’d play an entire set of them at his country-music park in Bean Blossom, Indiana. Rosenberg suggests that bluegrass gospel provided migrant “hillbillies” (his term) who felt alienated in urban churches a link to the religion they practiced back home, where spirituality was highly individualistic. He quotes a minister who lived among the Appalachians as observing “a widespread feeling that every person is his or her own preacher.”
