My Gospel Conversion

A TESTIMONIAL

Coming of musical age in the early '80s, I was swept up in the American indie maelstrom of great, weird, noisy punk rock—the Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Hüsker Dü, Black Flag. Growing up in Cleveland and then Miami, the people I encountered who identified as Christian tended to be the right-wingers who formed the fundamentalist base of support during the Reagan/Bush regime. And Christian music of any sort was considered a joke. So if you'd told me then that in 20 years I'd become obsessed with Christian music in general and gospel in particular, I'd have told you to fuck off and die, if I was feeling friendly.

That changed 10 years ago. I was at my friend Bruce's place in Chattanooga, Tenn., listening to a Sam Cooke collection on headphones. The first song on the album was "Touch the Hem of His Garment," which Cooke recorded with the Soul Stirrers, the gospel group he sang with before going solo and secular. It began the way many Cooke songs began: "Whoooooah, there was a woman," followed by a sexy pause. So far, so good—and then, "Back in the Bible days/She had been sick, sick so very long/When she heard that Jeeeesus was passing by/So she joined the gathering throng."

That was it. Newly clean and sober at the time and going to 12-step meetings daily, all that "higher power" talk was starting to work on me; at the least, it made me bristle less when the word "God" was uttered. Hearing the conviction, intensity, purity, and joy of Cooke and the Soul Stirrers was a Road to Damascus moment. I was hooked, and I needed to know more; I needed to know everything about this stuff. Soon, I was devouring recordings of black gospel music from its golden age—the '40s, '50s, and '60s.

Gospel, I came to realize, is the root of many things I love, from whole strains of jazz (notably Charles Mingus, Albert Ayler, and Jimmy Smith) to soul music itself, with Cooke and Ray Charles (who borrowed the gospel standard "My Jesus Is All the World to Me" to create "I Got a Woman") being the point men for the sacred-to-secular shift. Gospel's three-tiered emphasis on the ecstatic, the improvisational, and the visceral was right up my alley. Those aspects were a lot of what I already loved about Moroccan trance music, free jazz, and punk rock, but gospel didn't seem like a combination of these things so much as a distillation of them. It had a similar sonic intensity and DIY ethic as, say, straight-edge hard-core punk (sample lyric: "I'm warning you, I'll put a knife right in you if you don't go into the bathroom with me"), only the lyrics were much better ("You've got to live so God can use you—any day, any time"). Gospel was at the forefront of the civil rights movement; fittingly, its roots were in pre-gospel black spirituals like "Wade in the Water," often sung on plantations as a way for slaves to communicate that folks were running away later that night. In the post–civil rights era, gospel dipped in quality—there are dozens of exceptions, but in general, the keyboard sounds got hella cheesy, the arrangements became way less intricate, and the music began borrowing more from popular R&B than it gave back.

Until recently, I stayed with the idea that the charged, intense gospel I loved so much was a historical entity that existed mostly on recordings. Such ignorance is partly due to the fact that the music and culture were never part of my own heritage—I grew up a middle-class, sort-of-Episcopalian white dude who found most of the Episcopalians I came into contact with both low-key and uptight. When in fourth grade I decided to blow thing up in the basement with my junior science kit instead of going to church, my parents let me—they weren't terribly into church, either. Then I came across some of the most mind-blowing contemporary gospel I've heard in years, the past and present colliding brilliantly. Where was much of it being made? Right here in Seattle.

GOD IS ON THE AIR

Seattle is not a city like Chicago or Birmingham or Detroit. Its African-American community—the historical and current bedrock of gospel—is relatively small (just under 8.5 percent as of the 2000 census), and its music scene, while diverse, is dominated in the public ear by rock.

But like those cities, Seattle also has one of the most vibrant Christian music scenes in the country. One of the Christian rock genre's best labels, Tooth & Nail (Joy Electric, Starflyer 59), is based here, and during the '90s, local mopesters Pedro the Lion, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Damien Jurado seemed poised to make Christian emo-rock the next grunge. That never quite happened, but each of those acts attained a measure of both commercial and critical success—a big deal since the only overtly Christian rock acts to have attained widespread critical fandom are Low (who don't really count—they're Mormons) and Daniel Johnston (who doesn't really count—he's mentally ill).