{"id":7715,"date":"2004-03-15T08:49:34","date_gmt":"2004-03-15T08:49:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/good-bye_babylon.html"},"modified":"2004-03-15T08:49:34","modified_gmt":"2004-03-15T08:49:34","slug":"good-bye_babylon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/good-bye_babylon.html","title":{"rendered":"Good-bye Babylon"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the Weekly Standard, Matt Labash looks at a new compliation of gospel music and does a bit of comparison with CCM<\/a><\/p>\n

THERE ARE ALL SORTS OF GRAND THEMES running through Goodbye, Babylon: deliverance and judgement, mortal expiration and eternal salvation. Many secular critics haven’t quite gotten past the buckets of blood, alluded to in songs like the one by Da Costa Woltz’s Southern Broadcasters, a 1920’s string band, who ask “Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?” Or there’s the number by Ernest V. Stoneman–Thomas Edison’s favorite hillbilly artist–who, along with his Dixie Mountaineers, sing, Oh, the blood of Calvary’s brow I can see it flowing now. But to the church-steeped whose ears are already acclimated, it’s standard Sunday-morning viscera.
\n.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

\nThe more striking leitmotif is the blindness. The collection boasts Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Roger Hays, Blind Benny Paris and his blind wife, Blind Alfred Reed, Blind Joe Taggart, Blind Mamie Forehand, and no less than four Blind Willie’s (Davis, Harris, McTell, and Johnson)–the last of whom was blinded when his stepmother threw lye in his eyes during a fight with his father. And that’s just the artists with “blind” monikers. There’s also blind Roosevelt Graves and Brother (his brother wasn’t blind, but only had one eye), and blind Jimmie Strothers (found by John Lomax in a Virginia State prison, where he presumably came to Jesus after murdering his wife with an ax). So fashionable was it to be a blind gospeler, that it is said Blind Joe Taggart wasn’t even blind, he just had cataracts. And then there was blind Arizona Juanita Dranes, an influential gospel singer who once traveled from Chicago to Texas with a note of introduction that read, “Since she is deprived of her natural sight, the Lord has given her a spiritual sight.” Even nonbelievers have to give God points for consistency: He sticks with His blind people.<\/p>\n

Such physical impairments are a keen reminder that this is hard music made by hard people–singers to whom grace did not come cheaply, and who are not big proponents of today’s prosperity-gospel, Prayer-of-Jabez type rhetoric.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the Weekly Standard, Matt Labash looks at a new compliation of gospel music and does a bit of comparison with CCM THERE ARE ALL SORTS OF GRAND THEMES running through Goodbye, Babylon: deliverance and judgement, mortal expiration and eternal salvation. Many secular critics haven’t quite gotten past the buckets of blood, alluded to in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nGood-bye Babylon - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/good-bye_babylon.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Good-bye Babylon - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"At the Weekly Standard, Matt Labash looks at a new compliation of gospel music and does a bit of comparison with CCM THERE ARE ALL SORTS OF GRAND THEMES running through Goodbye, Babylon: deliverance and judgement, mortal expiration and eternal salvation. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7715\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}