Jesus Music
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The sound of the Jesus movement — late-sixties and early-seventies California folk-rock and soft rock turned to open evangelism: strummed and fingerpicked acoustic guitars, close family harmony, unhurried country-rock backbeats, electric leads kept warm rather than heavy, and plainspoken first-person lyrics about conversion, the second coming, and street-level discipleship. Production is thin and immediate, cut fast on church-funded budgets, so the records still sound like the coffeehouses, beaches, and park concerts they came from; the range runs from Love Song's gentle country-folk and Children of the Day's sibling harmonies to Larry Norman's sardonic, Dylan-inflected rock and Phil Keaggy's guitar-forward arrangements.
History
Jesus music grew out of the Jesus people revival among Southern California counterculture converts around 1969–71, when Chuck Smith's Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa began baptizing hippies at the beach and putting their bands on its stage; Larry Norman's Upon This Rock (Capitol, 1969) is generally counted the first Christian rock album, and Calvary Chapel's nonprofit label Maranatha! Music, founded in 1971, opened with the compilation The Everlastin' Living Jesus Music Concert, issued Children of the Day's Come to the Waters the same year, and released Love Song's debut in 1972. Campus Crusade for Christ's Explo '72 in Dallas — a week that June whose closing music festival drew an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 and put Love Song, Larry Norman, Children of the Day, Andraé Crouch, and Johnny Cash on one bill with Billy Graham presiding — was the movement's mass-audience moment and earned it the "Christian Woodstock" tag; Norman founded Solid Rock Records in 1975 to put out Randy Stonehill, Mark Heard, and Daniel Amos, while Myrrh carried Barry McGuire and 2nd Chapter of Acts and Good News carried Chuck Girard. By the second half of the 1970s the scene had hardened into an industry: "contemporary Christian music" displaced "Jesus music" as the trade term, CCM Magazine launched in July 1977, and the business moved from Southern California to Nashville — but the repertoire stayed, and Jesus music remains the acknowledged root of Christian rock, CCM, and the modern worship chorus.
Defining artists
Essential listening
- I Wish We'd All Been Ready(1969) — Larry NormanSpotifyYouTube
- Little Country Church(1972) — Love SongSpotifyYouTube
- Easter Song(1974) — 2nd Chapter of ActsSpotifyYouTube
- Puppet Strings(1976) — Randy StonehillSpotifyYouTube
- Sometimes Alleluia(1975) — Chuck GirardSpotifyYouTube
- For Those Tears I Died(1971) — Children of the DaySpotifyYouTube
Sources
- Larry Eskridge, "God's Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America" (Oxford University Press, 2013)
- David W. Stowe, "No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism" (University of North Carolina Press, 2011)
- Mark Allan Powell, "Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music" (Hendrickson, 2002)
- Both Sides Now Publications, "Maranatha! Album Discography", https://www.bsnpubs.com/word/maranatha/maranatha.html