After hearing this piece recently on Fresh Air, I picked up Fire In My Bones, a compilation of various gospel music rarities and/or oddities from the mid-1940s until a few years ago. I can usually tell when a musician has learned his or her craft in church, especially the Holy Roller church, because there is a certain urgency there that just cannot be faked. You hear it in everyone from the current round of neo-soul revivalists to Iris DeMent.

Fire In My Bones is an enormous collection, and I’m still mining it, but I can’t help but be struck by one of its better-known cuts: Elder Beck’s Rock And Roll Sermon from 1956. The elder is offering up a laundry list of rock’s evils, but his guitarist is laying down lines that would be familiar to Buddy Guy or Chuck Berry:

There’s always been a chicken-egg argument about the origins of modern rootsy popular music. The debate is over whether it came from the church, or whether the church adapted it. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t really matter. The secular-church-secular-church influences bounce back and forth, and the big difference is that you listen to one on Saturday night and one on Sunday morning.

I think modern music might be better served, though, if the Saturday night crowd listened to a little more of what the Sunday morning crowd had to offer.

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