I’m always interested to see how other Christians “do church.” It helps me retain some sense of the strangeness of God, and it keeps me from thinking that what I’m used to is normal and everything else is not-quite-right. I recently visited Old San Juan, Puerto Rico and here’s a bit of what I saw. (Click on the thumbnails to see the full image, then again for a larger image.)
May 1, 2013 /
Awc / Comments Off on Ecstatic Praise: the Sound of Sacred Steel
I Feel Like Pressing My Way, Ricky Fowler and Robert Randolph on Arhoolie Records’ Train Don’t Leave Me
They say that confession is good for the soul, so I have a confession: I love the sound of slide guitar. It’s pretty serious. Son House, Elmore James, the Allman Brothers–they all thrill me. When I first heard Robert Randolph play and began to learn about Sacred Steel, it was a gift from heaven. Really? God and that sinuous sound? In church? Oh, just take me there.
The Sacred Steel tradition comes out of the House of God, Keith Dominion church, and the Church of the Living God (Jewell Dominion). It’s praise music, it’s loud, and you don’t just sit still and listen. Like all the best church music, it’s about giving God your whole being. And like liturgy, it’s a way to reenact the drama of the Christian story in worship and experience God’s presence.
Robert Stone has written about the development of sacred steel and directed a documentary film, produced by Arhoolie and the Documentary Arts foundation. You can view the trailer here.
Fighting the urge to go on at length, I will only give you two recordings of Sacred Steel (today), both of which I came to through Robert Randolph–an amazing pedal steel guitarist who’s played with Eric Clapton, Dave Matthews, Santana, and many others. Randolph brought together a group of House of God musicians for the recently released Slide Brothers. I’ve never heard anyone play “Wade in the Water” like they do. Think: Deep Purple fronted by Stevie Wonder and Jimi Hendrix.
February 4, 2013 /
Awc / Comments Off on Life and death at the extremes of faith
Pastor Randy “Mack” Wolford photo by Lauren Pond for The Washington Post
A while back, when GraceisEverywhere was only a tickle in my brain, I came across an article in The Washington Post about a snake-handling pastor. It’s a good, thoughtful article that doesn’t try to sensationalize or ridicule its subject, and, as I often do, I filed it away in memory. Six months later I read that the pastor in that article, Randy “Mack” Wolford, had been bitten during the outdoor service he’d been planning and died an agonizing death. As the photographer noted, Wolford was “a victim of his unwavering faith, but also a testament to it.”
It can be easy to dismiss the people who occupy the extremes of Christian faith. To think they’re crazy. To shake our heads and say, “I can’t go there.” But a more interesting and complicated question to my mind, is not why are these Christians so different, but how are we alike? What part of the Christian message is so important to someone that they would handle snakes? How do they see God? Why do they adopt this practice and not any one of the many other available options? What do they believe about God that makes this possible, desirable?
People like Mack Wolford believe that God is powerful–that He makes promises and keeps them. I suspect that a lot of you reading this would agree. I also sense that people in Pastor Wolford’s tradition believe that we can compel God to do things when we act on His promises. I’m not so sure it works that way. But how different is this approach from what Elijah was doing with the prophets of Baal in I Kings 18?. Are we ready to condemn Elijah for his audacity? Are we ready to say that tests of faith never come from God? Should we never remind God of his part in our covenantal relationship–never make demands of the Almighty?
Perhaps we need to ask these sorts of questions from time to time, so we don’t grow too comfortable in our own practices and forget how strange most of them are to anyone who is not a believer. Perhaps we should ask ourselves, “What do I believe about God that makes me do what I do?” Are the extremes of faith so far from where I stand?
The only time I ever got stopped for speeding was early one Sunday morning when I was driving to church listening to this song. It was surely grace and mercy that kept me getting a ticket, for I do believe that, though I wasn’t going more than 10 miles over the speed limit I was in fact flying. Transported.
I love hearing Bozie Sturdivant sing this song.
But it wasn’t until years later I learned that, while Sturdivant was the first to record “Ain’t No Grave,” the song was actually written by a Pentecostal Holiness preacher named Brother Claude Ely. Listen to his version. It’s the same song, but what a difference! Sturdivant sings like a man pulling against heavy chains. Claude Ely is out to blind Death with a bright light and escape on wings of joy.
So where did this song come from? Claude Ely was born in Pucketts Creek, Virginia in 1922. As an adult he became a traveling revival preacher, driving from city to city. By one account, “He would drive a car, steering it with one hand, and with the other he would announce with a bullhorn, ‘Later tonight at 7:00, I’ll have a tent set up in the middle of town, please come out and experience the fire and Holy Ghost.'” Gladys Presley and her son Elvis went to one of those meetings.
Brother Ely’s ministry and influence spread. He become the first Pentecostal Holiness recording artist signed to a major label for strictly sacred music and songs. “Ain’t No Grave” became so well-known that today it is sometimes credited simply as “traditional,” as it is on Johnny Cash’s posthumous release. Cash’s interpretation of “Ain’t No Grave” has since became the foundation of a global collective art work, The Johnny Cash Project.
“Ain’t No Grave” is one of those songs you can’t believe somebody wrote. There are so many versions and they are so different. Each one powerful, haunting, defiant, triumphant. How can one human creation become the vehicle for all these individual expressions of the collective hope? How can a person be open enough to let that much of the Spirit flow into the world? How can a three-minute song reveal the miracle of the Church–we, though many, are one. One body in Christ.
When the final trumpet sounds, I’ll be getting up, walking around. Ain’t no grave can hold my body down.
This quote from singer Iris DeMent who grew up in a Pentecostal family:
“My mom, who sang straight up until the day she died, told me one day: ‘You know, Iris, singing is praying and praying is singing. There ain’t no difference.’ So I think, even though I’ve left the church and moved away from a lot of the things that didn’t do me any good, I continued to pray — and that is singing for me. That’s as close as I get to praying.”
