I’ve been waiting for this book for some time. Dr. Leah Payne’s God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Christian Contemporary Music (Oxford University Press 2024) dropped earlier this month. I think I first came across Payne’s intriguing research on Twitter. (See also Payne’s Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism: Making a Female Ministry in the Early Twentieth Century, Palgrave 2015) Over the years, CCM has been subject to any number of potshots–low brow, low quality, low church, etc. What I immediately saw in Payne’s approach was a recognition that (1) CCM is a more complex phenomenon than many realize and (2) that it’s prime material for a microhistory of Evangelicalism.
I haven’t read the book yet–just the introduction and the index. Even still, I have the impression that this isn’t a simple rehearsal of big names and talking points. As a former youth leader and CCM session musican in early 2000s Dallas, I’m impressed with the thick descriptions of the scene. Payne quickly establishes that she knows the insider discourse–the stories, the connections, and the tensions.
The question that guides this book is: What can one learrn about the development of evangelicalism by looking at CCM, one of the largest, most profitable forms of mass media produced in the twentieth century? I treat CCM charts as representative of a conversation among (predominantly, but not exclusively white) evangelicals about what kind of people they wanted to be, what sort of world they wanted to create, what kind of actions they thought would honor God. To listen to that conversation, I analyzed the music of twentieth-century songbooks and early recordings and radio programs, tracked the top-selling CCM through the pages of Contemporay Christian Magazine and the Billboard Christian music charts, and listened carefully to the top twenty-five CCM albums from the late 1970s to 2023.
Leah Payne, God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Christian Contemporary Music (Oxford University Press, 2024), 4.
I look forward to learning from Payne while revisiting memories comforting and unnerving. On all accounts, I suspect that this is a story about more than my formation or even that of a music genre.
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