We're looking at the emergence of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), in an effort to get rid of the idea that it was Amy Grant that "started it all." Amy's not a kid any more, but she's not really old enough to have been part of CCM's early days. I'm also hoping with our journey into the past you learn more about the music that you are listening to these days. CCM has made quite a journey, and as I write that I know full well that the next 20-30 years might be just as traumatic for the business as the last 20-30 years.

Where were you in 1970? I found myself in San Francisco at that time, and that was a period in our culture and history that I won't forget. Protesting the war in Vietnam was at it's peak in the early 70's, and the church that was right there in the forefront was Glide Memorial Methodist Church in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco.

The Pastor at Glide was an African American man named Cecil Williams, and I have great memories of those years and the work that we did at Glide. That work continues to this day, and to my knowledge, Rev. Cecil is still in the pulpit on Sunday mornings, preaching his timeless message of a need for change in our society.

Musically, the services at Glide had a band that truly rocked. At both Sunday services, lines would start forming two hours before the service began, and the line of people wanting to get in for worship would stretch for 3-4 blocks.

This was the era of what was called "Jesus Music," and it was founded by those that would fit the "hippie" stereotype. Many of the musicians that began in that period were offshoots of one of the first bands of the period, the All Saved Freak Band. This band had its roots at the Church of the Risen Christ (CRC) in Cleveland, Ohio. They released a number of albums on small labels, and toured in both the U.S. and Canada.

As it turned out, CRC became really strange and showed classic signs of becoming a cult. The church members and musicians moved to their own communal farm in rural Ohio and stored up guns for what they described as the "last battle." Sound familiar? That was also about the time an Indiana Pastor named Jim Jones moved his faithful band to California, and then to South America. I personally attended Jones' church in San Francisco twice, and realized very quickly that this was not for me. CRC disbanded in the late 1970's, and some of the founders were apparently still living on their Ohio farm into the late 1990's. And Jim Jones? We know what happened to him, don't we?

Another artist of that era was a man named Larry Norman (pictured above), and his album, Upon This Rock, was considered a landmark in the development of CCM. Norman was based in San Jose, California, and was first noticed as a member of People, a theatre-rock combo that shared stages with the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin. (Janis shopped at the grocery store I worked at in San Francisco during that period, but that's another story.) In addition to his music, he is credited with inventing the "one way" gesture, with the index finger pointing straight up, that became a trademark of Christian believers around the world, and is still used today by many Christian artists.

Christian references in songs became somewhat "trendy" in pop music around the 1969-1972 period, and examples would be the Beatles' "Let it Be" and James Taylor's "Fire and Rain." Judy Collins's version of "Amazing Grace" and the Edwin Hawkins Singers' version of "Oh Happy Day" became radio favorites as well. Then, of course, there was a song called "Spirit in the Sky" that made it all the way up to #3 on the charts and invoked a great debate about whether it was a celebration of Christ or a sarcastic parody of Christ in particular and religion in general.

Helping Christian music to be seen in the 1970's were Christian summer music festivals. The first was Explo '72 in Dallas, Texas, and sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ. It was billed as a "World Student Congress on Evangelism". Included in that even were mainstream artists that included Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and Rita Coolidge.

Perhaps the greatest impact of religious awareness on the general public came when Bob Dylan announced his conversion to Christianity in 1979. Dylan was a fixture in the 1960's as a rebel, and the first album that came out after being "born-again" was Slow Train Coming, with a single, "Gotta Serve Somebody" reaching #3 on the charts. It also earned him a Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. So here we had the same man who had written "Blowin' in the Wind" becoming rock's best known advocate of fundamentalist Christianity.

There were other changes in our American culture that had an effect on our music. One of those was Jimmy Carter's period as our President. You may have your own opinions about whether he was a good president, or not, but Carter may have been one of the best liked Presidents in modern times. He had no problem discussing his spiritual life, and he was an active layman in the Baptist Church. He was also the most visible spokesman for Habitat for Humanity, and still works hard for them today.

The year 1976 was dubbed by Newsweek Magazine as "the year of the evangelical", and that was the year that Chuck Colson published his best selling book Born Again, and Sparrow Records was founded under the direction of Billy Ray Hearn. Christians in music had to deal with the question of how far to reach out to a secular America and still continue to hold their beliefs about Jesus Christ.

And where does that bring us? To the late 1970's and the beginnings of a career in music by Amy Grant. I hope that you have found this interesting and informative, and as I mentioned in my previous installment, I give a lot of the credit for my research to The Billboard Guide To Contemporary Christian Music, by Barry Alfonso. If you want a lot more detail on CCM's roots and history, pick up a copy of this wonderful book. It was first published in 2002, and it contains a wealth of information about the music that I have grown to love. And since you are reading this, that you have grown to love as well. But more about Amy and the artists that followed her later.