Book Reviews -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 06:4 (Winter 2002)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous


Book Reviews

Honky-Tonk Gospel: The Story of Sin and Salvation in Country Music. By Gene Edward Veith and Thomas L. Wilmeth. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001, 188 pp., $17.99 paper.

When the typical American thinks of Nashville, he is more likely to think of the Grand Ole Opry than the LifeWay Christian Resources headquarters. And yet, sociologically speaking, the multi-billion dollar country music industry shares some common roots with the various streams of southern religion. Thus, the worldview assumptions behind southern folk music and southern folk religion are sometimes bewildering, even to those familiar with both. How can artists like Willie Nelson end a concert by moving, without comment, from crooning “Whiskey River, Take My Mind” to softly singing “Amazing Grace”? The authors of this volume contend that such is not as contradictory as it seems, since the popular music and the popular religion of the American South feed off of a common understanding of theological questions such as the relationship between sin and grace.

Veith and Wilmeth, both English professors and noted evangelical worldview analysts, suggest that country music is explanatory of southern pop theology largely because this art form, unlike many others, “has a way of acknowledging the sinfulness of sin.” With such the case, the authors set the stage by rooting southern folk music in the revivalist worship of frontier Baptists and Methodists, for whom “the line between the camp meeting and the church service began to blur” in the nineteenth century. Since country music has represented a kind of “secularized testimony,” the authors contend, it is of little surprise that this music can focus so much attention, simultaneously, to themes such as drunkenness, infidelity, marital love, and Christian conversion. Using country music as a test case for the cultural context of southern religion, Veith and Wilmeth explore the theological assumptions behind the lyrics of country musicians, assumptions that resonate in the region’s pulpits as well as its radio airwaves.

In this project of worldview analysis, the authors have identified some surprising—but deeply pervasive— theological underpinnings present in both southern music and southern religion. This is seen for Veith and Wilmeth in, for instance, a complex view of gender and sexuality. While southern folk culture, and especially southern religion, have been caricatured as reflexively misogynist and patriarchal, this volume argues that the lyrics of country music songs reflect a much more complicated tension. Female singers such as Kitty Wells and Loretta Lynn sing about the need for respect for women, but they do so from the vantage point not of secular feminism, but of a Christian tradition of husbands honoring their wives ...

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