Sacred Connections

I heard it in passing on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered one afternoon; it was a blurb for an upcoming story. The announcer said something about African American pentecostals who played their gospel music on country-and-western steel guitars. They called it "Sacred Steel."

I never heard the report that day, but the image stuck. It was so rich with paradox—even apparent contradiction—that, if you know anything about American music, it seemed inevitable. That’s because the mixing of musical repertoires, traditions, and instruments across racial lines is the story of American musical culture. For instance, there is no instrument more firmly associated with country music than the banjo, but it came directly from West Africa, where it was called a "banjar." We have jazz today because, after the Civil War, freed slaves picked up the brass instruments left behind by military bands.

And the whole business of playing string instruments with a glass or metal slide (the bottleneck guitar of the blues, or the dobro and steel of country) did not, as is often assumed, originate with the Hawaiian music fad of the early 20th century. According to Deep Blues, by the late, great Robert Palmer, it goes back to a West African single-string bow. This in turn survived in rural African American households as the "diddley bow," a string or piece of wire nailed to the wall and played with a slider. (And, yes, that’s the source for Ellis McDaniel’s stage name, "Bo Diddley.")

To add another layer of connective tissue, the pentecostal tradition itself is, from its founding, the most racially mixed Christian tradition in American history and one major seedbed of that late 20th-century phenomenon we call rock and roll. It is no accident that Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard all came from pentecostal backgrounds. In pentecostal churches poor and working class people, black and white, express themselves. They honor the Creator by bringing forth the very best and deepest things God has placed within them—their spiritual gifts. Around the middle of the last century, when country people moved to town, the joyful noise from those churches got mixed up with the erotic stew of a Saturday night honky-tonk and it changed the world.

Given all of that, "Sacred Steel" was just an accident waiting to happen, or to be discovered by the outside world. Discovery came in the early 1990s when a Florida music store owner happened to tell a local folklorist about his surprising number of African American customers looking for steel guitar paraphernalia. Turned out that for more than 60 years the steel guitar had been the totemic instrument of choice in a pair of small Holiness "House of God" denominations called, for short, the Keith Dominion and the Jewell Dominion. Sometime in the 1930s, up in Philadelphia, a fellow named Truman Eason brought Hawaiian-style guitar playing into the church. Then his little brother, Willie Eason (who is still playing), took the instrument into a whole different realm. Soon, if you wanted to move a House of God congregation, you had to have steel.

The music that followed in Willie Eason’s footsteps has little to do with the swooping and moaning chords of country and western pedal steel. Following Eason’s lead, most Sacred Steel players use a single-note style that owes more to blues guitar playing. The greater fluidity of the steel guitar gives these players an astonishing ability to mimic the human voice in the classic call-and-response style. The steel player may trade phrases with an actual vocalist, or set up his own dialogue on the eight-to-ten strings the steel affords. The music is rough-edged and rhythmic, but downright virtuosic in its command of emotional and spiritual nuances. It can sing "How I Got Over" or "Precious Lord" without a word of English and without an ounce of meaning lost.

Since Sacred Steel was discovered by outsiders, five CDs of live and studio recordings have hit the market. There are two multi-artist samplers (Sacred Steel and Sacred Steel Live) and individual discs by Sonny Treadway, Aubrey Ghent, and the Campbell Brothers.

For my money the Live sampler (issued in 1999) is the place to start. This music is most effective in the worship/performance setting, where the congregation, and the Spirit, can pull the players along to higher heights. The Live disc also features more vocals, which may make the music more accessible to the newcomer. But I’m also biased; the Live set is heavily dominated by the Campbell Brothers, who—though in their 40s—are the youngest of the recorded Sacred Steelers, and the ones closest in sound and spirit to the roots of rock and roll. The original Sacred Steel sampler features a wider range of artists and a wonderful version of Willie Eason’s famous tribute to FDR ("A Poor Man’s Friend"). All of this material is available from Arhoolie Records; (888) 274-6654; www.arhoolie.com.

DANNY DUNCAN COLLUM, a Sojourners contributing editor, teaches writing at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi.