AUDIO
THE GENESIS OF CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIAN MUSIC | Jeff Hawley
I’ ll go out on a limb and guess that you could rattle off a few good takes on the beginnings of classic rock music or how popular country music emerged. Bill Haley, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, etc. could all be options as founders of rock music, with particular strains of country music( Bob Wills, Jimmie Rodgers) and jazz( Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington) paving the way as precursors and influences for the development of what we would now classify as rock.
Now name the first contemporary Christian album or cite a handful of the origins of contemporary Christian music. Trickier to pull that one together, huh? Certainly gospel music popularized in the Pentecostal Church had an influence on early rock( Sister Rosetta Tharpe especially stands out here), but when did the first truly‘ CCM’ styled music arise in history?
If we are going to mix a heavy metal band or a modern country band in a secular setting it will be important to have some familiarity with the genre and its evolution over time. We wouldn’ t mix Morgan Wallen or Luke Combs in the same way as we would have mixed George Jones or Ernest Tubb, but we would be expected to at least have some awareness of how we got from the 1960s and 1970s‘ Countrypolitan’ Nashville sound to the Zac Brown Band. Hard to know where we are( or where we’ re going) if you don’ t know where we’ ve been. It would seem that at least in my experience this sort of connection to our roots in CCM is missing in many cases, though. Many top-tier worship audio engineers that I’ ve spoken with may be familiar with the history of secular music, but not so much when it comes to the progression of CCM before them. of the charismatic movement and providing a new option for the counterculture of the time— becoming a“ Jesus freak” rather than deciding to“ Turn on, tune in, drop out” as Timothy Leary suggested.
At around this same time period, two key moments came about in the formation of what we’ d now call Contemporary Christian Music.“[ Larry ] Norman’ s first evangelistic-themed rock album, Upon This Rock, was released in 1969,” notes Annette Griffin( 2023),“ just as the first swells of the Jesus Movement swept across America’ s West Coast.” She adds,“ As his songs spread like wildfire among the hundreds of thousands of young people hungry for more of Jesus, other Christian artists followed Norman’ s bold lead, and Contemporary Christian Music( CCM) was officially on its way.” If you haven’ t heard Norman’ s Upon This Rock, it is definitely worth a listen. This wasn’ t a rock album with a hint of a Christian message, it was a full Christian-themed album from start to finish in the popular rock style of the time. Released the same year as Woodstock and Altamont, it would easily have fit into the lineup musically.
Of course this turn to incorporating contemporary musical styles wasn’ t an immediate success that was readily accepted by churches across the world.“ Many conservative churches branded the songs‘ devil music,’ while many record stores refused to sell the albums, fearing that the religious content might offend loyal customers,” notes Griffin. Interestingly, this claim of crying out‘ devil music’ had its historical precedent going back as far as the late Middle Ages when it comes to pushing the sonic boundaries in worship music. At that time, even certain musical intervals( like
For those who are curious and would like to fill in this gap, we should probably start in the late 1960s. The Jesus Movement was just bubbling up in popular culture, following on the heels
88 April 2025 Subscribe for Free...