So... It started with Evie, more or less, in the early Seventies. Others had come before – singer/songwriter Larry Norman, notably – and there were others back then that I was unaware of, like the Second Chapter of Acts, a sibling vocal trio that was astoundingly talented and relentlessly creative.52
Then came the Imperials, whom we met earlier, the original Jesus boy band; then came Dallas Holm, the singer who vanished into thin heaven in David Wilkerson’s rapture movie; then came the crossover wonder Amy Grant, then just a teenager.
Suddenly it was the Eighties, and Grant’s male counterpart Michael W. Smith emerged. Primarily a songwriter/keyboardist, Smith had an unremarkable voice but an amiable presence, and he rapidly became Christian music’s Barry Manilow.
Petra, an anonymous Southern Rock wannabe from Indiana, retooled as the Christian Journey and roared to the front of what one might call a musical revolution in the Evangelical universe. Sandy Patti, a mainstream pop voice on a par with Barbra Streisand, had no trouble establishing herself as this revolution’s supervoice, proving that Christians could bring it with the best of them.
Petra soon had lots of company, as White Heart and Sweet Comfort Band and Mylon LeFevre and DeGarmo & Key deployed an endless cycle of national tours and loud but undistinguished albums; David Meece joined Smith in the Pop Vocalist: Male category, while Twila Paris took up a Joni Mitchell-like stance as the emerging genre’s prototypical singer-songwriter.
Stryper and Resurrection Band handled the heavy metal chores, and a number of secular artists joined the bandwagon (at least temporarily) - Bob Dylan and Kerry Livgren of Kansas, in particular. And later in this revolution, more than one Christian artist would stray out into the secular world – most famously Amy Grant, but also Leslie Phillips, a brainy and multifaceted singer-songwriter who rechristened herself Sam.53
Bill Gaither, the famed Christian songwriter who had given the Imperials some of his best material, dropped his quaint vocal trio and followed in the Imperials’ footsteps with the Bill Gaither Vocal Band, which persists to this day.
By the time this revolution peaked in the late Eighties, it had pushed Christianized pop-rock to the forefront of music. You couldn’t turn around without tripping over it: Christian touring acts competed with their secular counterparts for the largest venues in the biggest cities; news magazines and other media gave them plenty of attention; the Christian music section of secular record outlets grew and grew.
A genre had emerged: Contemporary Christian Music.
CCM, as it came to be known, elbowed its way into the national conversation, intent of parading its artistic worthiness. When it came to talent, that had never really been an issue; voices like Sandy Patti’s speak for themselves, as it were, and it’s hard to find a guitarist as phenomenal as the quiet and unassuming Phil Keaggy, who came to prominence through sheer force of his singular talent in the late Seventies.
When it came to content, however, CCM proved to be a second-rate imitation of the very stylings its practitioners sought to sanctify; put another way, CCM was to secular pop/rock as turkey bacon is to actual bacon – it looks the same, it (kinda) tastes the same, and it’s ostensibly better for you, only not really. CCM sought to recreate the secular thrills that would make the Evangelical universe a more inviting one, without giving dat ol’ Debil a foothold. It became (and remains today) pure marketing, with an undercurrent of cynicism that’s so deeply embedded that most of its current acolytes don’t even realize is there.
Put another way, CCM seemed to be saying to its parent genres, We can match you inch for inch and pound for pound - including and especially your mediocrity.
Why is he telling us this?
I’m telling you this, and straying beyond the scope of our tale, to underscore the point that during my youth, it wasn’t yet turkey bacon; Christian music was earnest and honest and powerful and presented without any of the posturing or inauthenticity that became so prevalent later.
The Imperials weren’t wannabes; they were true artists who relentlessly pushed back against creative boundaries, intent of musical discovery. Phil Keaggy never chased fame, only his muse; Amy Grant, the unwitting face of the genre, never settled into formula, and eventually crossed over to mainstream pop/rock with the help of superproducer Charlie Peacock. She pursued excellence from day one and never stopped - and without apology, she ultimately moved beyond CCM as Leslie Phillips had done, divorcing her Christian songwriter husband Gary Chapman and married country-pop legend Vince Gill.
The pursuit of excellence – that's what Christian music did at first. It was about evangelism, sure, let’s-sing-about-Jesus and all; but that long-ago day in Lincoln, Illinois, I wasn’t just hearing rock music with thinly-disguised scripture sprinkled on top; I was hearing a band that oozed creativity and passion from every pore, architecting a sound from the best of rock, pop, folk, R&B and even country. The Christian band that can pull that off will never be turkey bacon.
That’s what I’ll always remember. That’s what I still embrace.54
[In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll confess that not only did I keep my feet firmly in the CCM waters as a rock musician well into the Nineties (while simultaneously playing classic rock out in the real world) - I was also a CCM music critic for a major newspaper from 1985-2005. I interviewed most of the legends of CCM, including Amy Grant, Bob Hartman of Petra and Armand Morales of the Imperials. And I was simultaneously the paper’s critic covering heavy metal. As the two genres are more-or-less mutually exclusive, the discrepancy went unnoticed by the paper’s readership.]
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