The Rich Mullins story

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George Beverly Shea, 1909 - 2013

George Beverly Shea, who sang at Billy Graham crusades for more than 60 years, died on Tuesday at the age of 104.

According to the PR Newswire article, he was

Born in Winchester, Ontario, Canada, where his father was a Wesleyan Methodist minister, Shea's first public singing was in the choir of his father's church. Between Crusade, radio, and television dates in many countries, he sang at hundreds of concerts and recorded more than 70 albums of sacred music. At age 23 he composed the music to one of his best known solos, "I'd Rather Have Jesus."

He won a Grammy in 1965, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammys in 2011. He was inducted into the Gospel Music Association Hall of Fame in 1978 and the Religious Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 1996.

According to Shea's authorized biography, written by Paul Davis, Shea turned down an early offer of a career in secular music. He won a radio competition, singing Go Down Moses and was offered a recording contract, but wasn't comfortable with anything but gospel music. After he joined with Graham in 1940s, he wholly committed his talent to evangelical outreach. That talent did not go unappreciated. As Davis writes,

In those dizzy, busy days of Billy Graham Missions, his hit records barely kept pace with demand as his multiple admirers flocked to see him in person or on the silver screen in his movie musical shorts or cameo in Christian feature films.

The New York Times reports he was "perhaps the most widely heard gospel artist in the world."

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Lecrae and the future of Christian music markets

The Grammy for the year's best gospel album went to Lecrae, last night, the Reformed rapper who had a chart-topping album earlier this year where he rapped about writing "songs for the perishin' and parishioners." It was the second time he'd been nominated for a Grammy. 

Due to Grammy rules, his hip-hop album "Gravity" fell into the gospel category, rather than rap, but the win nevertheless highlights Lecrae's cross-over appeal. 

It's not simply taken for granted that a Christian rap album would be successful in a general market, nor that a Christian rap album with a general appeal would still be acceptable to Christians. But things are changing. Markets are shifting and attitudes are adjusting. The world of contemporary Christian music is very different than it was when Amy Grant stirred up so much controversy, and even since the '90s, when, as Heather Hendershot wrote, there were these ongoing struggles over faith and markets, with "people in the Christian music industry [...] attempting to negotiate between their heartfelt beliefs and a secular marketplace that they realize is wary of both evangelical faith and politics."

Those negotiations are different, today, and seem less tortured, for one thing. 

Lecrae has been on the forefront of a change. His Grammy win is part of that, as is the big big win for a band that started in a Vineyard Church, but last night took home the award for album of the year. 

In a recent interview with PBS, Lecrae talked about the relationship between Christianity and hip hop, and articulates the kind of argument he's been making for several years now. The argument itself is interesting, but what's more interesting to me is the fact, first, that he has to make this argument even though there've now been more than 50 years of continual evangelical adaptations of pop music, and, second, that he's been quite successful at it:

A lot of people will say hip hop, because of what it has been consistently associated with, should have nothing to do with Christianity whatsoever, like you can't be Christian and rap at the same time, but I would challenge them in that. There are things that culturally we have given some kind of cultural connotation to or perspective on, but it doesn't have to be identified with that.  

If I take a butcher knife, you would think 'horror movie.' But, I could just be serving food to the homeless and carving turkey and giving them out. And so, the culture has given this identity to the butcher knife as this evil thing that kills, but really you can take that use that for a whole 'nother purpose that's redeptive and helpful.  

I think rap is the same way. Culturally it's been used as something that's negative, and bad, but I think you can take it and use it for redemptive purposes and helpful purposes as well. 

I'm not sure it's clear why and to what extent Christian music markets have changed, by Lecrae and his Grammy are a good example of how it has.

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'I’m gonna baptize you in fire'

Well the future for me is already a thing of the past
You were my first love and you will be my last 

Papa gone mad, mamma, she’s feeling sad
I’m gonna baptize you in fire so you can sin no more
I’m gonna establish my rule through civil war
Gonna make you see just how loyal and true a man can be

-- Bob Dylan, in "Bye and Bye," on Love and Theft, narrating from the point of view of a God outside of time, with promises of providential purposes and a holiness-style sanctification for the chosen.

Alternatively, this could be Dylan riffing on a Faulkner novel, maybe Absalom, Absalom! Not that would be entirely different.

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'We gospel rappin'

Christian rap has topped the itunes' charts this week, with the release of Lecrae's album, Gravity, which opens, fittingly, with Lecrae rapping that he writes "songs for the perishin' and parishoners." Gravity was ranked as most-downloaded hip-hop/rap album, and the most-downloaded overall. Sales were expected to reach 60,000 units the first week, "easily a first for a Christian rapper" according to Time.

Lecrae raps on the album about such sales numbers and his own outsized talent -- as per usual, for the genre -- but then calling all that a "power trip," detracting from the fact this is all controlled by God:

And now with every sale I'm feeling my head swell
Well I'm a genius in my dreams
Even if I was, it was stitched inside my genes
I'm self-inflated, self infatuated
And somehow I convinced myself I finally made it
The truth is I was made like the mob
Geppetto put my together -- my strings lead to God

This marks an interesting moment for the relationship between Christians and rap. In an interview with the Christian Post, Lecrae said he sees conservative Christians being more open to rap simply because time has passed and the world has changed. He said, "Hip-hop … is over 40 years old and so when you have a change in power, when you have pastors who are 40, they've grown up knowing about hip-hop so it's not as strange to them, whereas if you have a 55-60-year-old person, they've grown-up and hip-hop was never a part of their life."

There's certainly a truth to that.

It also doesn't hurt that Lecrae has been associated with the Reformed Christian community, which is known for being robustly theological, insisting on the importance of orthodoxy and taking seriously even seemingly arcane details of doctrine. This means Lecrae comes to the Christian culture with an orthodox imprimatur.

Endorsement by John Piper can do a lot for one's Christian bona fides.

It's also a very interesting moment in the relationship between Christian cultural products and the secular market. It is difficult to imagine this success for a Christian rapper in sales through Christian bookstores. Lecrae's music still isn't played on most Christian radio stations. But then, it's also difficult to imagine this success coming through sales at secular record shops, where Lecrae's music would likely be segregated into a sub-section of "Christian music," or even a sub-sub or sub-sub-sub section or "Christian-urban" music.

Understanding the changes in cultural gatekeepers is essential to understanding this success.

Changes especially in the shape of the markets for music have lead to this moment, where the title song of the most downloaded album in America is Lecrae rapping,

And everything you hold in your hands you'll never keep
So why hold on?
I flow on to go on, before long I float on
Eternal life is what I'm thinkin' I'mma bank my hope on
Believe me, easy is irrelevant
The devil wants us burning for the hell of it
Elephants in the room say we can't talk about impending doom
Or we gospel rapping or preaching people out of they shoes
It's cool, I'll be that dude
We glued to our depravity
Until someone frees us from this gravity

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