![]() ![]() Such criticism mattered little to the devout. Barnum who cracked the whip in a circus of gaudy costumes, wildly gyrating acrobats and brass bands that played as if God were a cosmic hipster’. When Grace died in 1960, Ebony magazine called him a ‘Cadillac-riding materialist’ and ‘a brown-skinned P. Its flashy leader, Sweet Daddy Grace, wore a cape and was ‘like a god on earth’. Brown spent his at the United House of Prayer church in Augusta, Georgia. The ‘Godfather of Soul’ James Brown could also reflect on a religious youth. Lying flat on my back, I raised my hands to praise the Lord. Suddenly ‘it seemed as if I had been struck by a bolt of lightning. You really don’t know the Lord like you should until you receive it.’ When the power of the almighty struck her, she said, ‘the presence of God became so real’. Jerry Lee’s aunt and Jimmy Lee’s grandmother, Ada, liked to tell family, friends, and anyone who would listen about the Holy Ghost baptism she experienced at a camp meeting in Snake Ridge, Louisiana. What they both lacked in formal education, they more than made up for in stage presence, style and charisma. They bonded over music and their shared Pentecostal experience. ![]() Growing up in the Assemblies of God church, Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Lee Swaggart were close. It is true that Pentecostalism formed just one of the tributaries that fed the raging river of rock and roll, but the importance of the spirit-filled faith to the new hybrid genre was significant. Rock and roll – the soundtrack of rebellion and the music of side-burned delinquents and teenage consumers – owed a surprising debt to Holy Ghost religion. King and others were all raised in or regularly attended Pentecostal services in their formative youth. Jerry Lee Lewis, Swaggart’s cousin, along with Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Little Richard, B.B. Indeed, Pentecostalism – the fast-growing apocalyptic religion of spiritual abundance, speaking in tongues, healing and musical innovation – inspired many first generation rock and rollers. My family – Jerry Lee Lewis, with Elvis Presley, with Chuck Berry … started rock and roll!’ His claim served an obvious rhetorical point, but there was also much truth to it. I’ve seen it!’ His voice cracking with emotion, he railed: ‘I speak of experience. I’ve seen the unmitigated misery and the pain. ‘I don’t say that with any glee! I don’t say it with any pomp or pride! I say it with shame and sadness, because I’ve seen the death and the destruction. ‘My family started rock and roll!’ he exclaimed in front of the silent assembly of thousands. The issue was a personal one for him, he confided, pausing for emphasis and lowering his voice before lunging at the crowd, finger pointed upward to drive home his jeremiad. How had Christians made peace with this vile, hideous music, he asked with urgency in his voice, drawing out words like ‘pul-pit’ and ‘bye-bull’. At one performance, he took aim at ‘the devil’s music’: rock and roll. He shouted at his audience about the moral degeneracy that dragged reprobates through the gates of hell. Before the cameras and the glare of stage lights he paced back and forth, waving his arms like he was fending off a swarm of bees. In the summer of 1985, Swaggart was on the road, conducting one of his mass revival crusades in New Haven, Connecticut. The country rightly deserved God’s judgment, Swaggart assured his audience with fury. The Reagan-era televangelist was ‘tapping some powerful resentments here he is speaking to the disenfranchised’. A reporter at the New York Times took note. Americans had lost interest in the Bible, he warned with deadly seriousness. With his southern drawl, he thundered against Hollywood celebrities, evolutionary scientists, communists, homosexuals, Catholics, feminists, secular liberals and other ‘enemies’ of the faith. Like many other Pentecostal preachers – who were moving into politics at a rapid rate – Swaggart believed that the Holy Ghost emboldened him to witness the arrow-straight truths of the Bible. Some stations even took him off the air for his religious and cultural bigotry. Critics reviled his holier-than-thou pulpit posturing and his bellicosity. He had honed a brash, bold, loud style of preaching that made him a revered figure, both in the context of the Assemblies of God – a group of affiliated churches that formed the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination – and in the broader world of evangelicalism. At its peak, his ministry was taking in over one million dollars a week. His popular crusades and regular services appeared on television sets across the United States and around the world. The television preacher Jimmy Swaggart became a Christian megastar in the 1980s broadcasting from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. ![]()
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