Skip James, Larkin Poe, Charles Dickens and…Christmas

What have Skip James and Charles Dickens to do with Christmas?

Skip James was a totally original, Delta blues artist who recorded in the early 1930s. He was an accomplished guitarist and pianist, and his music, often in a dark, minor key, was eerie and mysterious, made all the more so by his singular, high-pitched, keening singing style. One of his Paramount 1931 recordings was Hard Time Killing Floor Blues, which reflected the plight of black communities during the Great Depression.

The problems of the Great Depression affected virtually every group of Americans, but it greatly worsened the already bleak economic situation of African Americans. By 1932, approximately half of black Americans were out of work, suffering from an unemployment rate two to three times that of whites. In early public assistance programs African Americans often received substantially less aid than whites, and some charitable organizations even excluded blacks from their soup kitchens. Racial violence again became more common, especially in the South. Lynchings, which had declined to eight in 1932, surged to 28 in 1933.

James’s song Hard Time Killing Floor Blues is a pretty bleak response to the situation he and his community found themselves in, in Mississippi during this period.

Hard time’s is here
An ev’rywhere you go
Times are harder
Than th’ever been befo’

You know that people
They are driftin’ from do’ to do’
But they can’t find no heaven
I don’t care where they go

People, if I ever can get up
Off a-this old hard killin’ flo’
Lord, I’ll never get down
This low no mo’

The song has been covered by a great many artists over the years, including Chris Thomas King, Buddy Guy, Colin Linden, Rory Block, amongst others. A recent one is, to my mind, one of the best – the Lovell sisters, known as Larkin Poe have given us an outstanding version on their album, Venom and Faith.

But what has all the doom and gloom of Skip James’s response to the Great Depression have to do with Christmas? Well, I started thinking about it as I re-read this year Charles Dickens’ Christmas novel, The Chimes. Much better known, of course, is his A Christmas Carol – a fabulous morality tale which is celebrated every Christmas through film, plays and TV shows. Miserly old Scrooge is shown the error of his ways one Christmas Eve and shows generosity and compassion to his beleaguered employee’s family, the Cratchits. (Incidentally, can any version be better than The Muppets Christmas Carol, from 1993?)

While A Christmas Carol points to the benefits of one man’s generosity to another family (and nothing wrong with that), as Tim-Laing Smith pointed out in a recent newspaper article, “nothing much changes in the wider world.”

In The Chimes, another man – this time a poor delivery porter – is granted a vision of the future, which shows his loved ones each falling into destitution and despair, crushed by injustice and a system of inequity. At the time, some thought Dickens was inciting a class war, so potent was the message of the book.

Anyway, it’s quite clear that the inequity of Dickens’ times and of Skip James’s time have not gone away. The U.S. Census Bureau in 2018 said that 39.7m people were living in poverty – over 12% of the population. 20% of the UK population is in poverty.

In 2015, the top 1% of families in the United States made more than 25 times what families in the bottom 99% percent did, according to a paper from the Economic Policy Institute.

This trend is a reversal of what was seen during and after the Great Depression, where the gap between rich and poor narrowed. “Rising inequality affects virtually every part of the country, not just large urban areas or financial centers,” said the report. The gap between the rich and everyone else, has been growing markedly, by every statistical measure, for some 30 years. The UK, likewise, has a very high level of income inequality compared to other developed countries.

Which brings us back to Christmas. Beyond the children’s nativity plays, the Christmas trees, the extraordinary excess of indulgence, and the broad details of the Christmas story is a passage from Luke’s gospel which perhaps is not so well known. Mary, pregnant with Jesus, goes to visit her relative Elizabeth, and the two women rejoice over what they see God doing through their pregnancies. Mary says,

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

Here’s where the Christmas story meets Charles Dickens and Skip James. The powerful are to be brought down, the lowly uplifted, the hungry fed and the rich sent empty away. The coming of the Christmas baby is meant to challenge and defeat the inequality the world experiences. Because into the world is unleashed a new power of hope and love in the person of Jesus, where Jesus-followers are to exemplify this new era of equity and justice and to work tirelessly to see the world change. As Tom Wright puts it: Jesus followers are to “pick up the threads of his own public career and live as kingdom-people under his direction, bringing his saving rule to bear in acts of love and mercy, in working for justice and truth…what will make the cacophony of human folly fall silent quicker than anything else is the strong, steady sound of those who love Jesus and celebrate his birthday singing his praises as Saviour, Messiah and Lord, and letting that praise inform and transform our public as well as our private lives. That is what Christmas is all about.”

Hard time’s is here
An ev’rywhere you go
Times are harder
Than th’ever been befo’

That’s the truth for a great many people in the world that we dare not ignore is this season of excess. But Christmas tells us it need not be the last word.

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Lonesome Christmas Blues?

How do you like your Christmas songs? Schmalzy soft jazz, White Christmas and all that? Gritty like the Pogues? (please, no!) Or maybe with a tongue firmly in cheek, like the Bare Naked Ladies?

And of course there are the Christmas blues songs. B B King with Merry Christmas Baby; Freddie King’s Christmas Tears; Koko Taylor’s Merry Merry Christmas; Roy Milton’s Christmas Time Blues; Bessie Smith’s At the Christmas Ball Blues; or maybe Joe Bonamassa’s Lonesome Christmas. All on the general theme of – it’s Christmas and my baby done left me / I ain’t got a baby / my baby and me are apart.

But then there’s Victoria Spivey’s Christmas Morning Blues, where she’s lamenting the fact that her man’s in jail; John Lee Hooker’s Blues for Christmas, with the plaintive “I ain’t got a dime;” and Blind Blake’s Lonesome Christmas Blues where he remembers last Christmas when he was in jail, and this Christmas isn’t much better – “I’m sick and I can’t get well.” Tough times don’t stop for Christmas. Just ask the millions living in war torn Syria or Yemen or South Sudan; other those going hungry in East Africa, or the brutalized Rohingya people of Burma. Or even the more than 43m Americans and 14m Britons living in poverty.

Truth is, the world can be a tough place, and none of us are immune from tough times – family problems, health problems, relationship problems. The celebrations of the holiday season don’t make these go away.

It’s hard to find a blues song that taps into the heart of Christmas. And by that I mean hope. G.K. Chesterton, the writer, poet, and philosopher said that “hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.” So it was with the first Christmas – a family living under the occupation of a brutal, despotic regime; a new baby, brought into the world in the most humble and poor of circumstances; the birth announced to a bunch of rough, uneducated shepherds; the new family becoming refugees, forced to move to a foreign country. Pretty tough circumstances.

And yet the story is shot through with hope – that change and redemption is possible. That things can be different. That the power of love unleashed into the world through the coming of this baby can ultimately be more powerful than all the tyrants and war-mongers and greed-merchants and liars. That justice and fairness can prevail. Instead of despair at the state the world is in, the Christmas story urges us to take courage – see the possibility of redemption and change for ourselves and begin to make a difference in the world around. Hope in a hopeless world.

Hope. New possibilities. Change. It’s what Bethlehem is all about.

Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.

The First Guitar Heroine of Rock ‘n’ Roll

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame during 2018 with an award for “Early Influence.” The Hall of Fame hailed her as one of the essential figures in the history of rock and roll” and said that “if she had not been there as a model and inspiration, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and other rock originators would have had different careers.”

“No one deserves more to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.”

Born in 1915, Rosetta Tharpe was a major star during the 1940s and 50s, sensationally filling arenas. In 1951, Griffith Stadium in Washington D.C. sold out, with 25,000 fans clamouring to attend her on-stage wedding. Her trail-blazing rock ’n’ roll tinged gospel performances, driven by her exceptional electric guitar work, sent audiences wild made her a major celebrity. She inspired the early generation of rock ‘n’ roll artists and Johnny Cash called her his favourite singer and biggest inspiration.

An early musical prodigy, Rosetta’s guitar chops were formidable. Reports from people who saw her play repeatedly used the phrase: “she could make that guitar talk.” She played the guitar with abandon, and yet still maintained control. There was power, excitement, pleasure and emotional release in her playing. Gayle Wild, her biographer, says that for Rosetta, the guitar was “an instrument of ineffable speech, of rapture beyond words.” Etta James was blown away by her playing, saying, “she payed guitar kind of like T-Bone Walker, in a real “bad” groove.” One musical director in New York said,

“She could do runs, sequences, arpeggios, and she could play anything. You could say something and she could make that guitar say it…I mean she could put that guitar behind her and play it: she could sit on the floor and play it, she could lay down and play it. And that made the people just go berserk.”

Rosetta was raised by her mother Katie and grew up immersed in the black Church of God in Christ, where Rosetta began to sing and play from an early age. By the time she was a teenager, she and her mother were touring the gospel circuit in the northern Midwest, where tent and revival meetings shaped her musical techniques, learning how to project over shouting, crying and singing worshippers, and developing a guitar playing style that enabled her to be heard and her playing seen by the congregation. Her trademark style of lyrical improvisation was likewise developed at this time.

After leaving the church for a period of time and making it big in the jazz clubs of New York City during the Swing Era (she became known as the “swinger of spirituals”) and playing with the likes of Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong, Rosetta returned to her sanctified roots as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, developing a successful career that was both career and calling.

Rosetta’s faith was a constant throughout her life, singing her gospel songs like Precious Memories and Didn’t It Rain, right up until her death. At her funeral, the eulogy said that, “she always testified of God’s goodness to her and he undying love for Him. She suffered a lot but she realized that if we suffer with Him we shall also reign with Him.”

No doubt it was that faith that sustained her during the struggles she had during her life, both as an African American and as a woman. She lived and performed during the Jim Crow era in America, where for black artists, pervasive racial discrimination and police harassment was a deeply resented fact of life. As she toured, she could not eat at most restaurants, stay in most hotels or use public toilets. To get around the problem of restaurants not serving black people, she employed a white chauffeur, who, when they had an emergency need for food when travelling, would go into the restaurant and buy food for the whole group. She sings, in her release of “Trouble in Mind” in 1941, “When you see me laughin’, I’m laughin’ just to keep from crying,” poignantly conveying the pain of the black community.

She also suffered a considerable amount of domestic abuse. Her first husband, Tommy Tharpe, was a preacher who benefited greatly from his association with Rosetta, but he was unfaithful to her and beat her. She married Foch Allen, after her divorce to Tharpe in 1943, but he proved to be both unsupportive to her career and abusive, interested only in what he could get out of her. Her third husband, Russell Morrison, whom she married in a fabulous stadium wedding, exploited her financially, insisting on her performing towards the end of her life when she was very ill.

It’s a familiar story with women artists, maybe particularly black women artists – Billy Holliday, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Rihanna. As Zora Neale Hurston put it in Their Eyes Were Watching God “De n***** woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.” Rates of domestic abuse are bad enough generally, but black women suffer from much higher rates of death from domestic violence than others. Unbelievably, the state of Mississippi still refuses to make domestic violence and other abuse grounds for divorce. What a disgrace. Sadly, as music journalist Jim De Rogatis said in a 2013 interview, “Nobody matters less to our society than young black women. Nobody.”

Yet Rosetta had the strength of will and personality to rise above the enormous obstacles and set-backs she faced. Armed with her faith, her huge talent and her charisma, she paved the way, howling and stamping and wielding a mean electric guitar, for the rock ‘n’ roll artists who would follow her and lived a life that continues to reverberate and influence right up to the present.

Read the biography of this remarkable woman: Gayle F. Wald, Shout, Sister Shout: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer, Sister Rosetta Sharpe.

 

And for a fine collection of her songs: The Absolutely Essential 3 Cd Collection Box Set

And check out this terrific cover of the Tommy Dorsey song that Rosetta made her own, by Brooks Williams and Hans Theessink.

40% off The Gospel According to the Blues

The Gospel According to the Blues dares us to read Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount in conversation with Robert Johnson, Son House, and Muddy Waters. It suggests that thinking about the blues–the history, the artists, the songs–provides good stimulation for thinking about the Christian gospel. Both are about a world gone wrong, about injustice, about the human condition, and both are about hope for a better world. In this book, Gary Burnett probes both the gospel and the history of the blues as we find it in the Sermon on the Mount, to help us understand better the nature of the good news which Jesus preached, and its relevance and challenge to us.

“The Gospel According to the Blues is at once a primer in American music, culture, and race and religious history. Gary Burnett moves deftly from lyrics to theory and back again, from Blind Lemon Jefferson to the insights of contemporary scholarship. Highly readable, thoroughly researched, and with deep respect for the art form on every page. For best results, read with scratchy vinyl recordings of the masters as accompaniment.”

Michael J. Gilmour, Providence University College, Otterburne, Manitoba, Canada

Order at: Wipf and Stock quoting LABOR40

 

The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock’n’Roll

Randall J. Stephens, The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock’n’Roll, (Harvard, 2018)

Randall Stephens has given us a riveting account of the way in which rock music impacted the Christian world in the United States, since its emergence in the 1950s. It’s well researched and detailed, and is expansive in its scope, covering the relationship between early rock ’n’ roll and Pentecostalism, the racism inherent in early Christian reactions to the new music, the resistance of conservative religion to the Beatles and other 60s developments, and then the emergence of Jesus rock, morphing into Contemporary Christian Music and the various reactions to that.

The book is well written and never dull, deftly exploring what has been a complicated relationship between rock and fundamentalist and evangelical religion. Along the way we get something of a history of evangelical Christianity in America over the past 60 years, including the distinction between fundamentalists, evangelicals and charismatic/neo-Pentecostals, and the way in which these groups saw themselves over against the prevailing culture in the United States. I liked the quotation from Duke and Notre Dame historian, George Marsden, which Stephens mentions (albeit noting that it doesn’t tell the whole story): “a fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something.”

When rock ’n’ roll first emerged, fusing blues, gospel, rhythm and blues, and country in the 1950s, American Christians viewed it as sinful, deranged, demonic, the “devil’s music.” Yet by the late 60s and early 70s, large numbers of conservative Christians had embraced rock music as a means of evangelism and praise to God. Stephens skilfully tracks this trajectory and is able to demonstrate that “much of what animates evangelical churches in the twenty-first century comes directly from the unlikely fusion of Pentecostal religion, conservative politics, and rock and pop music.”

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Randall begins by tracing the development of rock ‘n roll from its roots in southern Pentecostalism. The hard-driving, powerful music in the worship of holiness and Pentecostal services gave rise to such popular performers as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Godmother of Rock and Roll, with her guitar-fuelled gospel. From a background in Pentecostal religion came major figures like Johnny Cash, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and, of course, most importantly of all, Elvis Presley. Presley not only appropriated the rhythms and beat of his white Pentecostal background, but integrated black gospel into his style of singing and performing. Such integration was anathema to white southern evangelicals in the 50s who objected to the “jungle music” and “voodoo rhythms” of rock ‘n roll.

We then have a fascinating chapter entitled “Race, Religion, and Rock ‘n’ Roll,” where Randall explores the racist nature of white southern Christian reactions to the new music that was capturing the hearts of the nation’s youth. Fears about vulgarity, sexual licence, communist plots, and drinking and dancing combined with the worst of racial prejudice to fuel a fundamentalist loathing of rock ‘n’ roll.

The arrival on the scene of the Beatles in the 1960s is the subject of Randall’s next chapter. Long hair, an emergent youth culture, drugs and androgynous clothing, along with the youth hysteria that greeted the Beatles in America drew the ire and condemnation of church leaders. Billy Graham, in 1968, bemoaned the worldwide “moral deterioration,” which was a clear sign of the approaching apocalypse. Randall takes us through the fall-out in the Christian world of John Lennon’s “We’re more popular than Jesus now” remark through to the beginnings of some soul-searching amongst evangelicals about how they needed to relate to a younger generation.

The next phase of the story is the emergence of Jesus rock and its morphing into Contemporary Christian Music, and the various reactions to it. Randall does an excellent job of catching the spirit of the time in the early 70s when some Christians, led by people like Larry Norman, began to express their faith in the medium of rock music. “Why should the devil have all the good music?” Norman asked. Or indeed, long hair and hippie attire. Even Billy Graham began to wear his hair longer, as folk and rock music were increasingly incorporated into church youth events. Professional rock and pop performers flourished, including Norman, Barry Maguire, Phil Keaggy, Chuck Girard and Cliff Richard, and mainstream performers like Johnny Cash, Pat Boone and eventually, at the end of the 70s, Bob Dylan proclaimed the gospel in their songs.

All of this provoked a furious fundamentalist reaction with figures liked Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye and Jimmy Swaggert fulminating against “a musical revolution that integrated aggressive music and aggressive sex” which ought never to be mixed with the gospel. Notwithstanding this, by the 1990s, Christian pop music and rock-infused worship music had broadly infiltrated the evangelical church and Contemporary Christian Music made up a respectable share of the total recording market, returning huge revenues to successful bands through sales of recordings and merchandise.

Randall closes this fascinating study with a short review of bands and artists with a Christian outlook which have gained critical and popular acclaim, including some that attempted to crossover from a Christian market to a more general one. He notes the Christian background and motivation of U2, and amusingly recounts the late 1990s foray of crooner Pat Boone into the heavy metal arena.

The Devil’s Music is a highly engaging examination of the struggles of American evangelicalism with the emergence and mainstreaming of rock music that gives us an important insight into the nature of the modern form of this type of Christianity, its values and fears. It’s a remarkable story of shock, opposition, accommodation and finally embrace which anyone interested in both the recent history of the church or that of rock ‘n’ roll will thoroughly enjoy.

[Randall Stephens has included a great Spotify playlist based on the book here]

Mavis Staples at Union Chapel, London – 7 Things We Learned.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Blues Hall of Fame inductee, Mavis Staples has had a remarkable career. She sang with her family band which moved from their church roots in the 50s to the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement in the 60s, before becoming a commercially successful R&B group in the 70s. Turning solo, Mavis recorded with Prince and in the last twelve years or so, has re-invented herself as a rootsy, bluesy, Americana artist, with a heavy dose of gospel. Her latest album, If All I Was Was Black addresses the broken heart of today’s America, suggesting that, despite the racism, violence and lying, redemption is possible. Mavis Staples wants to “Bring us all together as a people – that’s what I hope to do. You can’t stop me. You can’t break me. I’m too loving,” she says. “These songs are going to change the world.”

Down at the Crossroads caught her show in Union Chapel, London. Here’s what we learned:

1. Mavis Staples is a lovely person. That’s it. No qualifications. She loves her band, she loves performing and she loves her audience. And it showed from the moment she breezed onto the stage to warm applause and cheering at Union Chapel.

 

2. Union Chapel is a wonderful concert venue in north London. It’s a working church which hosts gigs by major artists and recording sessions, and has fantastic acoustics. Nobody is very far from the artist which gives the whole things a wonderful, intimate feeling. You can sign up for dinner before a gig and so get in early to nab your seat – and contribute to the church’s homeless ministry by so doing.

 

3. Mavis’s first song set the stage for the rest of her set – she sang about “love and peace,” and invited the audience to “take my hand.” “I got people who love me,” she sang, in that unmistakable voice which can rasp, croon, scat or belt it out, as the need may be. You begin to feel the love, forgetting for a while Trump, Brexit and all the other stuff that has been annoying you. We ended up, most of us strangers, holding each other’s hands and beaming like children.

 

4. Love and peace for sure – but also, she said, she was there to bring us some “joy, happiness, inspiration and positive vibrations.” And that she did for about 75 glorious minutes (too short, Mavis, but then you have just turned 79, sorry for bringing that up!).

5. And the joy and inspiration clearly comes from Mavis’s Christian faith – she unabashedly gave us the old blues song, Death Comes Creeping (covered by a host of artists, including Mance Lipscomb, Fred McDowell and Bob Dylan) – asking “whatcha gonna do when death comes creeping at your door?” Followed up by Far Celestial Shore, with its “jubilation, joy and exaltation when I see my lord.”

 

6. That faith is no other-worldly faith, but one that is driving for change here and now. She talked about working for justice in the 1960s, inspired by Rev Martin Luther King Jr., and about needing to continue that work, especially at the moment. “I’m thinking about going up to that White House,” she said, to the biggest cheer of the evening. Go for it Mavis!

 

7. Her five-piece band was everything you’d expect from long-time collaborators. Guitarist Rick Holmstrom treated us to a wonderful virtuosic display in a variety of styles, rewarded along the way by a fist bump from Mavis, and singers Donny Gerrard and Vicki Randel rounded out the sound, allowing Mavis to let her vocals soar with freedom.

A glorious, inspirational evening – keep going, Mavis, we love you!

Bob Dylan’s Blues: Trouble No More

Volume 13 in Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series has just been released, Trouble No More, covering the so-called “gospel years” of 1979-1981. There’s a two CD pack with 30 songs, including a couple never before released, and then a whopping 8 CD + DVD offering which, at over £135, I’m afraid priced me out. I might have a friend who can help me out though!

Dylan’s three “gospel” albums from the period were widely pilloried at the time, but the release of this material, all recorded live from concerts in the United States and Europe, has shown what anybody who attended these gigs at the time knew – the performances were nothing short of electrifying. I went to my first Dylan concert on July 1, 1981 at Earl’s Court, London, which was kicked off by four tambourine swinging female gospel singers, Regina McCrary, Carolyn Dennis, Clydie King and  Madelyn Quebec, before Bob weighed in with Gotta Serve Somebody. By this stage, Dylan was beginning to mix in some of the old songs with the gospel material, so it wasn’t long before the whole place was erupting to Like A Rolling Stone. I was in Bob heaven with the set list that night, but it was the energy and conviction of the performances that pulsated through the arena that stayed with me long after the final chords of Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door had died away.

Rolling Stone, never a fan of Dylan’s gospel material, admitted of Trouble No More, “What’s often lost in those arguments is that it produced some of his greatest concerts,” while the Times of London grudgingly confessed that “the two-disc version is ample proof that Dylan finding God was, in musical terms at least, no bad thing.” The New York Times understood better what went on: “What comes through these recording is Mr. Dylan’s unmistakable fervor…[the songs are] “anything but routine…Mr. Dylan flings every line with conviction.” Dylan scholar Clinton Heylin says simply, “Like the mid-1960s, he was at the absolute peak of his powers.”

This was a prolific period. More than a dozen songs that didn’t make it onto the three albums from 1979 to 1981 show up in Trouble in Mind. The body of work composed by Dylan during this time “more than matches any commensurate era in his long and distinguished career – or, indeed that of any other twentieth century popular artist,” says Heylin, and it’s hard to disagree.

The song performances are in turns exhilarating, rowdy, playful, and combative, combined with moments of prayerlike reverence. It’s hard not to be moved by What Can I Do for You, from San Diego’s 27 November 1979 performance. This was a centrepiece of Dylan’s performances in these concerts and his passion and sense of gratitude is undeniable. The gospel backing and the mournful harmonica adds to the poignancy. “You have given all there is to give; what can I give to you?” Dylan’s sense of indebtedness oozes from the song. My wife and I were listening to this song the other day in the car. She doesn’t really like most of the music I listen too – she’s more of a classical music fan. But she suddenly said, “He’s really a fantastic singer, isn’t he?” The character of Dylan’s voice will always, I guess, be something of an acquired taste, but he is indeed a very fine singer, able to phrase a song exquisitely, and, as he does on this one, wring the emotion out of it.

What I found interesting listening to these performances is how much they are blues songs. Gospel blues, yes – but nothing wrong with that – we have a long line of such songs from Blind Willie Johnson and Rev. Robert Wilkins onwards. Slow Train, Gotta Serve Somebody, When You Gonna Wake Up, Do Right to Me Baby, Are You Ready and Dead Man, Dead Man are all served up in a heady mixture of the blues, rock and gospel. There’s something about the blues, when it’s played right that just manages to get right inside you and touch you deeply. And that’s what’s going on here with these songs – aside, of course from the deeply felt lyrics.

And then there is the very solid blues rock of The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar. The November 13, 1980 performance of this from San Francisco features Carlos Santana on guitar with a couple of blistering solos and Dylan as intense as you’re likely to hear him. The song is not on my vinyl version of Shot of Love, but was eventually added to the CD version.

The Groom’s lyrics are not anywhere near as explicit in Christian meaning as most of the other songs, which speak clearly of God, Jesus, the need for faith, repentance and Christ’s second coming. Here Dylan seems to be in enigmatic prophet mode, speaking of a world of chaos, madness, war and misunderstanding. But remember, this is a period where Dylan has steeped himself in the scriptures, and with his prodigious memory, all this theology and apocalyptic imagery is still swirling around his head. The talk of the groom, the implied bride and waiting at the altar seems to me has to refer to Christ and his bride, the church, straight from the pages of the Revelation of St. John. The stage, says Dylan, is burning and the curtain is rising on the new age, but we’re not quite there yet – the groom (Christ) is still waiting at the altar for his bride (Christ-followers) to be welcomed to the new age. For now, there is chaos, massacres of innocents, enough to nauseate you. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

The song is a powerful one – “a fiery piece of molten fury” [album liner notes] and the repetitive blues riff drives home the prophet’s urgent message. Before anyone gets too dismissive of this apocalyptic thread in Dylan’s songs, here and elsewhere, let’s realize that, like it or not, the idea of a second coming of Jesus has been part of orthodox Christianity for the last two thousand years. Yes, recently some Christians have got a bit confused about the idea of heaven as a golden city in the skies and about expecting a so-called “rapture,” but Christians have always hoped for a new world forged out of the old, where peace, love and justice would prevail. And that idea comes through loud and clear in, for example, When He Returns: “Like a thief in the night, he’ll replace wrong with right, When he returns… Will I ever learn that there’ll be no peace, that the war won’t cease, Until He returns?”

Dylan gives us, as the New York Times put it, “a sense of moral gravity, a righteous tone, apocalyptic thoughts and a delight in the rich and powerful receiving their come-uppance.”

The important thing for Christians is to live now as if that new age mentioned in The Groom’s Still Waiting At the Altar had already arrived – peaceably, loving neighbours and enemies alike, and seeking justice for all. That’s the answer to Dylan’s question, What Can I Do For You?