In truth, though, rock music owes much of its claim to coolness to the Christian faith. Rock and Christianity have had a deep and complicated relationship since the earliest days of early rock ’n’ roll, as Randall J. Stephens, a professor of history and American studies at Northumbria University in Great Britain, explores in The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll. Indeed, Christianity—particularly, the fiery, wildly emotional, speaking-in-tongues strains of Pentecostalism and the “holiness” church long entrenched in the rural South—helped create rock ’n’ roll.
As other historians have discussed and Stephens notes, the sacred and the profane had entwined roots in the blues and black gospel music that predated the commercial mutation of blues that came to be known as rock ’n’ roll. Thomas Dorsey, an African American composer esteemed as one of the seminal pioneers of gospel, gave us the Sunday-morning classics “Peace in the Valley” and “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” (beloved by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.). Dorsey also, under the stage names Barrelhouse Tom, Georgia Tom, and Texas Tommy, wrote or cowrote gems of Saturday-night blues, such as “It’s All Worn Out” and “It’s Tight Like That,” in the early decades of the 20th century.
“It’s Tight Like That,” released on a 78 rpm single by the bluesman Tampa Red in 1928, is said to have sold some 7 million copies at a time when “race records” created by and for African Americans were severely hobbled by racist marketing and distribution practices and had practically no airplay. Working under different names in distinct musical idioms, Dorsey reinforced the wall between religious and nonreligious music in public, while exploiting its permeability by slipping from one side to the other on the sly.
About 25 years later, African American musicians of the mid-century such as Ray Charles explicitly brought sacred and secular music together by turning gospel songs into R&B numbers. Charles changed a word here and there, pushed the beat, and shifted the emotionality from reverential adoration to unfettered sensual euphoria. Charles took “Talkin’ ’Bout Jesus” and produced “Talkin’ ’Bout You”; he used “This Little Light of Mine” to make “This Little Girl of Mine”; and he adapted “It Must Be Jesus” into “I’ve Got a Woman” (working with cowriter Renald Richard). Charles took a jackhammer to the wall dividing the two worlds Thomas Dorsey had navigated by adopting dual identities. Sam Cooke, Lou Rawls, Mavis Staples, and other African American artists followed Charles’s suit, calling the music that linked spirit and body soul.
