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6 BACK IN CHURCH "I'm gonna get me religion. . ." The grainy videotape shows an elderly man seated on a plain wooden chair and holding a steel-bodied National resonator guitar, the sort prized by 19308 blues players for their volume and durability. Before he plays it again, the old man has a message for the mainly young, mainly white audience watching him out of the range of the camera: I was brought up in church from a little boy on up. And I didn't believe in no blues. I was too churchy, and I didn't believe in that. And I talked against it. And I really was called to preach the gospel. That's why I knowed it so good. I didn't have to read the book so much, it came from above.. . . I'm sitting here playingblues and I play church songs, too. But you can't take God and the Devilalong together, because them two fellows, they don't communicateso well together—they don't get along so well together. Now you've got to separate those two guys.. . .Yougot to follow one or the other. Yo can't hold God in one hand and the Devil in the other. Yougot to turn one of 'em a-loose.. . .You're a friend or an enemy 'twixt God and the Devil.Youcan't sit straddle of the fence—you got to give up one side or the other.1 The speaker is Eddie "Son" House, one of the early giants of Mississippiblues , who in the mid-1960s found a second musical career playing to mainly white audiences. His homily is delivered in soft-spoken, halting , and heavily accented tones to an audience which, judging by its impassive reaction to his attempts at humor, understands little of what 234 B A C K IN C H U R C H he is saying. He is addressing one of the perennial issues of AfricanAmerican folk music—the relationship between blues and religion. The conclusion he reaches—"you can't straddle the fence"—is a commonly used analogy; the incongruity of House's espousal of it is heightened by the fact that before his soliloquy, he performed an unaccompanied religious song, and after it came a blues. Blues and religion is a topic which has been extensively discussed in books and articles, usually from a secular perspective. Finding examples of cross-pollination between the two is not difficult. Religious references abound in blues lyrics;blues phrases are not uncommon in gospel tunes. A number of gospel singers have "crossed over" to sing secular music; a number of blues singers have turned to sacred music. Most observers see blues and sacred music as antipathetic, citing blues singers' jibes at religion and church-goers' rejection of the blues as "the Devil's music." But community feeling on the subject covers a wide range. At one end of the spectrum is rejection of allnonreligious music. This ispart of Church of God in Christ doctrine, but other congregations can also take a disapproving line. Blues singer Jessie Mae Hemphill, who belongs to the New Salem Baptist Church near her home outside Como, Mississippi, says, "People look at me, you know, when I go to church. They think it's so terrible for me to go to church because I sing the blues. They say I ought not to go to church. I say, 'Well, I ain't doing no badder than nobody else.' I said, 'I ain't had no woman's husband and I ain't killed nobody. But somebody in here will be doing worse than me. Somebody in here now is going with some woman's husband, and that's just as bad as me playingblues.' And I tell them, 'God knows everything. Godknows why I'm doing this. He know I needs to pay my bills.' They sayyou can't serve the Devil and the Lord, too. But my belief about it is that God spared me and brought me this far."2 Most Baptists are not as hardline as those Hemphill describes. Writer Mark Humphrey singles out the denomination as having a theology which makes it easy for performers such as Son House (and Jessie Mae Hemphill) to mix sacred and secular: "House was a Baptist, and an important tenet of Baptist faith is 'once in grace, always in grace.' A believer 'fully saved' in this denomination might believe that a little blues singing wouldn't jeopardize...

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