MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

No story speaks to America’s spirit of rebellion and its sacred-secular tensions more than the story of rock music. While today rock is ubiquitous, few understand the nuts and bolts of its beginnings and especially not of rock’s crucial debt to the so-called “holy rollers” of the Pentecostal church. This paper (which first ran on PopMatters.com) examines not only the amazing connection of the Pentecostal church to rock music, but these stories amazing parallels, also.

Any short list of the pioneers of rock ‘n’ roll that best exemplified its high energy and unhinged approach, both the wildest and the most joyous of performers, includes Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard. Presley had (besides being white) the bold sexuality and the wild charisma to spark the phenomenon world-wide. Lewis’s live shows were essentially sexualized, proto-punk rock. Richard bridged the spiritual ecstasy of his church with the orgasmic highs of the secular world. What do these three legends have in common? Each was raised in, and had their musical lives formed in, the Pentecostal churches of the South.

Incredibly, the story of modern Pentecostalism is a remarkably familiar one: fully integrating racially (beginning in 1905 in Los Angeles) well-before integration’s wider social acceptance; practitioners speaking in a manner that made no sense to outsiders; and wildly emotive services fueled by equally frenetic music.

As with rock, outside observers truly believed that the participants had gone mad. Examining this sacred-secular connection is a key insight into the American psyche.