Humming My Way to Hell

When I turned the car ignition yesterday morning to start my commute, the radio came on and the first line I heard was a twangy call to arms: “We need a whole lot more of Jesus and a lot less rock and roll.”

I’d been thinking for some time of writing about my fondness for bluegrass music, but I’d struggled to come up with a “hook” that might make such as essay more than simply the banal equivalent of a Facebook “like.” I’ve found my gateway, I thought as I listened to the tuneful diatribe. I later would learn it had been recorded 52 years ago by singer/songwriter Wayne Raney, an Arkansan who’d died in 1993.

See, my personal sentiments are more or less the exact opposite of those expressed by the late Wayne Raney. Extending “Jesus” to describe the frighteningly expansive reach of moralizing Christianity into seemingly every corner of American life—as represented by everything from the battle over reproductive rights to the recent surge in the GOP presidential race of Rick Sanctimonious, um, Santorum—I feel strongly that we actually need a whole less Jesus in our national life, not more. And if I can define “rock and roll” as all the great early recordings that apparently were raising Raney’s blood pressure back in 1960—Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, the late Buddy Holly—I’d frankly love to hear more of that stuff on the airwaves, and would rather Americans spend their spare time rediscovering the Sun Records catalog than lobbying their lawmakers to ban abortion and prevent gays from marrying, based on the Bible or their reading of it.

In fact, there’s little about bluegrass music that would suggest I’d be a fan. (Its contributions to rock and roll’s roots notwithstanding.) As a genre, it historically has produced, and continues to spawn, a lot of Wayne Raneys. While many bluegrass songs don’t center on That Old Time Religion, many, too, are all about the wages of sin and the redemption that comes only through accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Which isn’t surprising, given bluegrass’s roots in the God-fearing hollows of the Appalachian Mountains in the early decades of the 20th century. But this means I spend a lot of time listening to combos whose message to me is not exactly encouraging. Last weekend, for instance, as I drove home from Starbucks, some True Believer started singing none-too-sympathetically into my ear about how the likes of me will be eternally gnashing our teeth and burning in hell as soon as the Son of God returns and “time is no more.”

But it’s not just the religious aspect of bluegrass music that makes it and me an odd couple. It’s the sound, the socioeconomic disconnect, seemingly everything. I mean, I grew up on a suburban cul de sac in New Jersey, lived for The Who in college, had Springsteen parties with my newspaper buddies in the ’80s, and for the past 16 years have lived in Bethesda Fricking Maryland, a town of attorneys and government workers where every bumper sticker carries some liberal, secular-humanist sentiment. If bluegrass music is all about the Righteous Path and the riotous fun of pickin’ and pluckin’ down at the general store, my white-collar surroundings are all about separating church and state and listening to Pandora inside one’s McMansion.

Not that Lynn and I live in a McMansion, or that I personally have moved, technologically, beyond CDs and radios. The point, though, is that on paper I would seem an unlikely candidate for bluegrass fandom. Yet, what station has become my go-to preset in the car? WAMU ‘s Bluegrass Country. Not only that, but one of my favorite programs on that station—105.5 locally on your FM dial, streaming at http://bluegrasscountry.org—is Sunday morning’s “Stained Glass Bluegrass.” Which, as it name suggests, is, well, “right church-y.”

Not that I’d call myself a real aficionado of bluegrass music. Although at this point I know a lot of the traditional and contemporary Big Names—the Carter Family, Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley, Hazel Dickens, Ricky Staggs, the Seldom Scene, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver—and can recognize some of those artists when I hear them—much of the time I’ve no idea who I’m listening to. Or even what instruments are being played, beyond the obvious ones like fiddle and banjo. And I haven’t started buying bluegrass music, either. It’s still mostly what I listen to in the car or when I’m dressing for work, mixed in with public radio programming and local all-news station WTOP.

What’s bluegrass’s appeal for me? It’s energetic. The musicianship can be amazing and the vocals starkly beautiful. It’s heartfelt. Its themes at root are loving, longing, losing and hoping—and who can’t relate to those things? Death is a frequent visitor, just as it is in this blog. Bluegrass is hand-crafted and somehow not of this time. Which appeals to me, as uncomfortable as I am in this new century of sensory overload and nonstop connectivity. Also, the radio station I listen to has great hosts, whose folksy patter I enjoy and find soothing. My favorite DJ is an old-timer named Ray Davis who knew and taped many of the greats. He regularly plays songs recorded decades ago in the home-basement studio in West Virginia from which he now broadcasts.

In fact, this past week was the winter pledge drive, and one hour my buddy Ray was bemoaning the lack of callers. So, I opted to put my money where my radio dial was and ante up. It turned out that one of the thank-you gifts available at my giving level was Wayne Raney’s 20 Old-Time Gospel Favorites—featuring, yes, “We Need a Lot More of Jesus,” and other none-too-subtle pieces of lifestyle advice such as “Drifting Too Far from the Shore” and “Don’t You Want to Go to Heaven?”

I ended up going with Don Rigsby’s Doctor’s Order: A Tribute to Ralph Stanley. While I’m surprisingly comfortable being damned by my radio station to the eternal fires, I find I’d still rather my personal music collection cut me a little more slack.