Book Review in the American Catholic studies newsletter
My review of Leah Payne’s God Gave Rock & Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music (Oxford University Press, 2024) appears in the Fall 2024 edition of the American Catholic Studies Newsletter.
Here’s the beginning of the review:
As a teenager in the 1980s raised in the midst of evangelical Protestant subculture, I grew up listening to contemporary Christian music. In seventh grade, when my family did not have enough money to buy a Christmas tree, my sole Christmas present was Amy Grant’s 1982 platinum-selling album, Age to Age. As a developing musician, I supplemented classical piano and flute practice by playing and singing from songbooks that corresponded to several of Grant’s albums: Age to Age, Straight Ahead, and A Christmas Album. In high school, I joined the Word Book and Record Club, receiving monthly cassettes of new releases in the mail. (My favorite, which I still have, is Vision, by British songwriter Chris Eaton, perhaps best known for his co-write with Grant on the modern Christmas anthem “Breath of Heaven.”)
Forty-some years later, during a visit to my mother’s home this summer, I found Grant’s Age to Age album and songbook in a cabinet of vinyl LPs. I brought both items back to my home to listen anew with the ears of a professional pianist-composer-recording artist and as a liturgical jazz scholar (like Grant, I have my own songbooks of original sacred music). I also wanted to listen to Grant’s breakout album for the sake of writing this review of Leah Payne’s 2024 book, God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music. I mention all this background at the outset to clarify my relationship to some of the music that Payne discusses, as both a past consumer of that music and now a practicing musician who composes music for the church.
Payne’s work fits alongside recent books like Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne in telling a larger story of how conservative politics became wedded with Christian subculture—in this case, with the contemporary Christian music (CCM) industry. In her introduction, Payne puts forward a guiding question: “What can one learn about the development of evangelicalism by looking at CCM, one of the largest, most profitable forms of mass media produced in the twentieth century?” (4) By tracing the growth of sheet music publishers, Christian radio, and evangelical organizations with three-letter acronyms (CBA, Christian Booksellers Association; NAE, National Association of Evangelicals; and NRB, National Religious Broadcasters), Payne explains how the term “evangelical,” which became an umbrella term for white, Protestant, conservative activists in the 1930s and 1940s, coalesced into the political behemoth that it is today due in part to the influence of CCM (17).