After the Sunrise. The Chuck Wagon Gang. 1940. Okeh.

 Of the many uses for religion sought out by American Christians within their myriad faiths, the least talked about may be fear. Americans promulgate the claim that moral value systems give our lives meaning and purpose without bothering to ask if these values are at core a mass reconfiguring of social and supernatural fears handed down to us from preceding generations. Americans are possessed by fear, in all its insidious forms, often practicing religion in order to intensify it, give it the monstrous dimensions of drug use or madness. It’s also become the work of the twenty-first century church in this country to help transmogrify the soul-hardened quality of fear into anger, with the intent of remaking it, under influence of those twin pillars of bourgeois virtue pride and self-importance, into a socially viable form of civic rectitude and political advancement. What then of that breed of true believer who rejects the politesse of contemporary living in favor of the radioactive entanglement of their obsession with Biblical fury and discipline? The true believer prefers the cold, seething lessons of Old Testament doctrine to the Christ’s liberal minded sermons on forgiveness and social justice; a misanthropic lunatic who considers himself on equal footing not with man but with God and fallen angels. If the story of rock and roll is sometimes a history of uninhibited personalities occupying extreme positions, then its possible to recognize the true believer—who has weaponized his fear of modernity as his only means of survival among the secular hypocrites—as forebear. The glee heard on the Chuck Wagon Gang’s After the Sunrise from 1940 is the unmistakable sound of the death cultists’ cheer, spurning the physical world in favor of an imaginary one. The record’s male and female vocalists sing with a macabre exhilaration pleasingly strange to twenty-first century ears; close in spirit, say, to “Gabba gabba. We accept you. One of us.” That touch of madness, along with a legacy of musical influences, aren’t country gospel’s only remaining connections to the story of rock and roll. A centuries old sadness hums just below After the Sunrise’s message of terrestrial deliverance; the grim awareness that, after the sunrise, a gross sentimentality will eventually erode the true believer’s Christian fanaticism, reducing it to a mere spasm of middle class piety, alongside jingoism and law enforcement fealty. Conceptually, as great a Fall as the one that measures the divide between the Chuck Wagon Gang and Michael W Smith, Hank Williams and Morgan Wallen, Jim Jones and Robert Jeffress; between cultural freak and freak of normality. From 1991’s Columbia Country Classics: Volume 1: The Golden Age


July 31 021

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