Current Reading: Into the Mystic

Recently I started reading Into the Mystic, by Christopher Hill, which is fairly new (2017). I’m only a few chapters in, but so far it’s fantastic. It’s a look at how the ’60s became a “detonator” to “explode visionary music into the mainstream” (from the back cover). It’s a nice counterpart to Rob Young’s comprehensive book Electric Eden, which is more or less about the folk revival roots of psychedelia and progressive rock.

If you’ve been following my posts lately, you know that I’ve been building a case for how late 19th century movements connect to the 1960s. We all know about Tolkien and fantasy being popular then, but what I haven’t really seen argued anywhere is how the ’60s can be seen as not just a revival but a direct continuation of late 19th century thought. I have no delusion of being the first person ever to think it, but it’s not an idea that you can toss out and have everyone go, “Yes, right, I know about this.”

Well, there I was, on the train, cracking open a new book, and four pages in, I read this:

By the end of the nineteenth century, it looked as if this artistic agitation was succeeding in moving popular taste toward the visionary. There was a vogue for the supernatural, for stories of horror, ghosts, ancient mysteries, and lost civilizations. There was a new interest in both Western and Eastern esoteric traditions….It was at the same time a golden age of English-language children’s literature, itself a visionary school….It was the age, as we’ve mentioned, in which scholars began to collect and preserve ancient folktales and songs. It saw the rebirth of old seasonal festivals like Christmas. This fin de siecle period affected Anglo-American culture in ways that are still potent today, especially in popular culture. It was a direct precursor of the counterculture of the 1960s.

There is my entire dissertation introduction, in a single paragraph. On the fourth page! I would be annoyed if I were not elated to have the reference.

I’m going to print that out and frame it over my desk for whenever I need a reminder of what the hell my point is, and how I can put it succinctly. Thanks, Hill!

Did you know that bit, about Victorians inventing Christmas? Yeah. Christmas as a feast day has existed since the 4th century, and we know it uses traditions of the Roman festival Saturnalia, but Christmas as a joyful time of Goodwill Toward Men, in which we gather with our families to sing carols around bedazzled conifers? That was kind of invented by Charles Dickens. It’s not a coincidence that the Christmas revival happened at the same time that the medieval revival was beginning. All of our modern Christmas traditions are based on 19th century ideas of how people in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period celebrated, before Puritans canceled Christmas.

So that’s what I’m reading now. Pick up Into the Mystic if you want an engaging look at ’60s music. It isn’t a scholarly work and I think that this leads to a few claims that are persuasive but unsupported, one of which I’ll get to below. However, by and large I think most of his points are excellent (as far as I’ve read) and I trust his insight.

His first chapter, “An Unexpected Power,” ties in well to things I was thinking about with my posts on black guitarists. Remember the bit about Sister Rosetta basically inventing rock & roll in 1944? I think she doesn’t get credit because it’s not electric (apart from the whole issue of being a woman), but the elements are all there—blues, boogie-woogie, and gospel. As Hill points out, rock & roll, from 1952 all the way…well, maybe not up to now (have you heard the soporific oatmeal masquerading as rock lately?), but up to somewhere in recent history—rock has always been about the ecstatic spirit, with the singer being like a medium, channeling raw, aetherial Power into something we can experience with our own eyes and ears. Blues gets credit as the precursor to rock, and maybe it gave rock its body, but it’s gospel that gave it soul.

Hill argues “the standard narrative about the origin of rock and roll as a music is that it came out of the encounter of country music and the blues. This isn’t exactly wrong, but it almost willfully ignores the glaringly obvious affiliation with gospel music.” (p. 24)

This is not entirely correct. I want to say, “if he were a trained historian, he’d know better,” but even in critical histories, I think the debt that popular music owes to African spirituals is widely acknowledged. Hill writes, “In the long story of African-American music, the sacred precedes the secular.” This is pretty widely known and accepted. Thinking of ’60s white rock, I think he might be correct that we are not as quick think of the role of gospel singers in the craft ecstatic performance. But gospel is acknowledged in the ’50s, as a part of the root, heart, and soul of rock ‘n roll—we all know Elvis’s gospel work—so I think some of the oversight where ’60s rock is concerned is not a secular bias but simply taking that history for granted. The other issue, as I see it, is the commercialization of rock giving it a white face. White Pentecostals are a minority among Protestants; white Christianity in the US has always been more somber than ecstatic. So having lost the association with black musicians, rock has its black history forgotten, except as an abstract, academic point.

Given the state of white churches after centuries of Calvinism, and the calculated, deliberately unemotional state of classical music by the ’50s, is it any wonder that white youth turned to pop music to experience the ineffable?