Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722) by Peter Bebergal Read Free Book Online Page A

the most influential in American music. From the spiritual came gospel, and gospel itself would soon become a staple not only of African American churches but of white churches as well. With each successive generation, whatever was deliberately African about the shout and spiritual was eventually lost. But the rhythms and stylistic forms remained. More important, the spiritual rebellion inherent in the music would continually find its expression in every form of African American music. Soon it would begin its snakelike climb into the branches of American popular music, from gospel to the blues and eventually to rock, where it would provide popular music with a means to lift it out of the ordinary, to challenge ideas of what music could and should be, and what it could mean.
    Pentecostalism brought together the music and worship style of the African American churches. Once thought to promote the devil, shouting and other ecstatic practices were claimed by Pentecostalism as an authentic response to being filled with the spirit of God. But mainstream churches did not approve of such behavior as an expression of worship, even if it was white folks doing the shouting. Within mainstream Christian sects, the Pentecostal movement was believed to be the devil’s secret congregation.
    For white America, including the church he was raised in, Elvis brought to bear much of what they were afraid of: sex by way of the devil’s own infinite lust. This fear was also deeply racist. Many believed that what was most potent and dangerous about rock was its roots in African American music: rock music was tribal, pagan at its core, and would seduce white teenagers like the serpent seduced Eve. Rock is sex. In the 1957 book
CloseThat Bedroom Door!
by Lambert and Patricia Schuyler, the authors claim a conspiracy among black men, aided by the government, to have sex with white women. The conspiracy runs deep. With their “jungle music,” blacks have taken to inculcating the youth into loving rock and roll, merely a means to a nefarious end: “[Teenagers] have been taught to love it and never does it cross their minds that this incessant emphasis upon the Negro with his repulsive love songs and vulgar rhythms is but the psychological preliminary to close body contact between the races.”
    Fears of popular music were bubbling up long before Elvis, however. The post–Civil War African American churches saw the devil everywhere. Secular music and dancing were particularly questionable. But in an effort to keep the devil at bay, congregations still used the methods of worship adopted as slaves, what the historian Eileen Southern calls “the hand clapping, foot stomping, call-and-response performance, rhythmic complexities, persistent beat, melodic improvisation, heterophonic textures, percussive accompaniments, and ring shouts.” The great irony of these young churches is that such musical elements were once employed to call upon the spirits, heal the sick, and divine the future. The even deeper irony is how these also became staples of white churches, where the devil was once seen as having to be worked and beat out of the slaves.
    Little Richard embodied the basic conflict within rock’s relationship with church music, with those very same churches calling it the devil’s music. Little Richard (born Richard Wayne Penniman) was raised a Seventh-day Adventist, a congregation with an apocalyptic theology that sees any form of secular musicas opposed to the teaching of Jesus. He grew up playing and singing gospel, and by the time he left home to make a mark for himself, he was already drawn to the blues, his first act of rebellion. Gradually he incorporated rock into his songs, not always successfully, but in 1955 he turned “Tutti Frutti,” originally a sexually explicit blues song, into a vehicle for his own flamboyant style of musicianship. Richard played standing up, banging away on the piano, and