Podcasts about pentacostalism

This week we have part two of our interview with Laura the creator behind the fantastic Magical Mystery Church YT Channel. Laura goes over her research into how the New Age, Occult, and Doctrines of Demons have infested the Christian Church. She touches on NAR, Latter Rain, William Branham, Paula White and many, many more. Don't forget to check out part one if you haven't yet! Cheers and Blessings.   Please Check Out Magical Mystery Church On YouTube http://www.youtube.com/@magicalmysterychurch3424Support My Work https://www.patreon.com/theoddmanoutBuy Me A Coffee!  https://buymeacoffee.com/theoddmanoutVenmo Tips - @theoddmanoutCash App Tips - https://cash.app/$theoddmanoutT-shirts, Mugs and Stickers At Spring See Link For Discount - https://theoddmanout.creator-spring.com/Links https://linktr.ee/_theoddmanout 

Ern Baxter was born in Saskatchewan, Canada. He was raised in classical Pentecostalism. Later in his teenage years, Ern lost his faith reacting to legalistic religion. He returned to Christianity after he was miracously healed from pneumonia and supposedly, after being informed by a friend that being a Christian isn't about what you do for God, but it is about what Jesus Christ has done for you. On May 24, 1932 he entered full time ministry as a musician.Ern Baxter was a major Christian force in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom.Some of these teaching were personally recorded by the founder of Broken Bread Teaching Tapes, Lyvonne Goza. She acquired as many of Baxter's tapes as she could, making it possible to offer these teachings to you, today.Near the end of his life, Ern was attempting to impart what he had learned to younger men – his "Timothys". Broken Bread Teaching Tapes was given permission by Ern Baxter, before his death, to reproduce and distrubute his teaching. We are attempting to preserve his teachings by converting his aging tapes into digital format and to distribute them free of charge using the internet to anyone who will listen to them. We are continuing his efforts to produce – his “Timothys” who spread the Word Of God.

We take a look at the recent, tragic final act of a doomsday cult in Kenya that left 448 dead and another 613 missing in March of 2023. How did cult leader Paul Mackenzie, pastor of Good News International Ministries, convince his followers to starve their own children and then themselves to death? And how did the Pentecostalism he based his messages in contribute to his insane and deadly teachings? Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89vWant to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :)For all merch-related questions/problems: store@badmagicproductions.com (copy and paste)Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcastWanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast.Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch.

America is easily the most religious country among the wealthy western democracies. In almost every other nation, greater wealth and educational levels correlate with a drop-off in levels of religiosity. The USA remains a conspicuous outlier in this regard. Why?   Episode 18 of Before We Were White - "New, Improved, and Super-Sanctified, Part 1" is out now. An exploration of the curious synergy between God and Mammon in American history, from Canaan to Corporation, from Pilgrims to Pentacostalism, from Jamestown to Jonestown. Part 1 goes right back to the source, tracing the line between Bronze Age storm gods and the Medieval Catholic church.

Can you spare 3 minutes to take our listener survey? After the survey closes, we'll randomly select 5 respondents to receive a free, signed, and personalized copy of Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most. Click here to take the survey! Thank you for your honest feedback and support!“For theology to be worth anything, it must traffic in real life, and that real life begins in the heart.”Theologian Simeon Zahl (University of Cambridge) joins Evan Rosa to discuss his book, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, reflecting on emotion and affect; the livability of Christian faith; the origins of religious ideas; the data of human desire for theological reflection; the grace of God as the ultimate context for playfulness and freedom; and the role of the Holy Spirit in holding this all together.About Simeon ZahlSimeon Zahl is Professor of Christian Theology in the Faculty of Divinity. He is an historical and constructive theologian whose research interests span the period from 1500 to the present. His most recent monograph is The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, which proposes a new account of the work of the Spirit in salvation through the lens of affect and embodiment. Professor Zahl received his first degree in German History and Literature from Harvard, and his doctorate in Theology from Cambridge. Following his doctorate, he held a post-doc in Cambridge followed by a research fellowship at St John's College, Oxford. Prior to his return to Cambridge he was Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Nottingham.Show NotesExplore Simeon Zahl's The Holy Spirit & Christian Experience“For theology to be worth anything, it must traffic in real life, and that real life begins in the heart.”Theology becoming abstracted from day to day life“There is a tendency that we have as human beings, as theologians to do theology that gets abstracted in some way from the concerns of day to day life that we get caught up in our sort of conceptual kind of towers and structures or committed to certain kinds of ideas in ways that get free of the life that Christians actually seem to lead.”“Real life begins in the heart.”God is concerned with the heart.Emotion, desire, and feelingsWhere does love come in?Martin Luther and Philip MelanchthonPhilip Melanchthon's 1521 Loci Communes: Defining human nature through the “affective power”Affect versus rationality at the center of Christian lifeCredibility, plausibility, and livability of ChristianityAuthenticity and the disparity between values and beliefs and real lives.Doctrine of GraceEnabling a hopeful honesty“What Christianity says and what it feels need to be closer together.”Evangelical conversion in George Elliot's novella, Janet's Repentance“Ideas are often poor ghosts; our sun−filled eyes cannot discern them; they pass athwart us in thin vapour, and cannot make themselves felt. But sometimes they are made flesh; they breathe upon us with warm breath, they touch us with soft responsive hands, they look at us with sad sincere eyes, and speak to us in appealing tones; they are clothed in a living human soul, with all its conflicts, its faith, and its love. Then their presence is a power, then they shake us like a passion, and we are drawn after them with gentle compulsion, as flame is drawn to flame.” (George Eliot)Art's ability to speak to desire.T.S. Eliot: “Poetry operates at the frontiers of consciousness.”Exhausted by religious languageHow the aesthetic impacts the acceptance of ideasDurable conceptsWhere theological doctrine comes fromSimeon Zahl: “In what ways are theological doctrines themselves developed from and sourced by the living concerns and experiences of Christians and of human beings more broadly? Doctrines do not develop in a vacuum or fall from the sky, fully formed. Human reasonings, including theological reasonings, are never fully extricable in a given moment from our feelings, our moods, our predispositions, and the personal histories we carry with us. furthermore, as we shall see in the book, doctrines have often come to expression in the history of Christianity, not least through an ongoing engagement with what have been understood to be concrete experiences of God's spirit and history.”“People were worshipping Christ before they understood who he was.”“Speaking about human experience just is speaking about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.”Desire and emotion as pneumatological experienceSourcing emotional and experiential data for theological reflectionErnst Troelsch: “Every metaphysic must find its test in practical life.”“The half-light of understanding”Nietzsche: “The hereditary sin of the philosopher is a lack of historical sense.”Augustine's transformation of desireEmotional experience as inadequate tool on its ownNoticing our own emotional experiences“If you want to pay attention to the Holy Spirit in theology, that means you have to pay attention to embodied experiential realities.”Worshipping of God as Trinity before identifying the doctrine of the TrinityKaren Kilby's “apathetic trinitarianism”Pentecostalism, affect, and playEstablishing a spiritual connection between you and GodTouch, sweat, and movementNemi Waraboko's The Pentecostal Principle: Ethical Methodology in New SpiritOpenness to new things, dynamismPlay and graceAn embarrassment of play, in the best way possibleThe freedom of the Spirit: free to get it wrong in a “relaxed field”Grace as the ultimate “relaxed field”Production NotesThis podcast featured Simeon ZahlEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim BergelandA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

In this miniseries I sit down with Brian and Troy, hosts of the popular podcast "I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist"We speak about the history of Pentacostalism in Australia and the world, and how the pair worked together to create a platform that is helping droves of survivors around the world. August is International Cult Awareness Month. Please visit this website to learn more, find out how you can support, calls to action and survivor resources. International Cult Awareness Month (ICAM) is when communities come together to highlight the dangers and realities of cultic practices. We hope to provide support for those affected. Every August, ICAM aims to educate the public about cults and their harmful impacts.ICAM seeks to expose the covert operations of cults, equipping individuals with the necessary knowledge and resources to combat and prevent cultic manipulation. The month-long observance hopes to empower individuals, families, and communities to stand against cults through open dialogue, shared stories, educational resources, and emotional support.International Cult Awareness Month's ultimate goal is to raise awareness of cults' pervasive and insidious nature and give hope to those affected. It is a message to those entangled in these harmful practices that they are not alone, that support is available, and that they have the strength to reclaim their lives.Get in Touch or Support:Patreon - patreon.com/thecultvaultCult Vault Shop - cultvaultpodcast.com/shopCrimecon UK 2023 - https://www.crimecon.co.uk/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cultvaultpod/Twitter: https://twitter.com/CultVaultPodReddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/Cult-VaultGmail: cultvaultpodcast@gmail.com

In this miniseries I sit down with Brian and Troy, hosts of the popular podcast "I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist"We speak about the history of Pentacostalism in Australia and the world, and how the pair worked together to create a platform that is helping droves of survivors around the world. August is International Cult Awareness Month. Please visit this website to learn more, find out how you can support, calls to action and survivor resources. International Cult Awareness Month (ICAM) is when communities come together to highlight the dangers and realities of cultic practices. We hope to provide support for those affected. Every August, ICAM aims to educate the public about cults and their harmful impacts.ICAM seeks to expose the covert operations of cults, equipping individuals with the necessary knowledge and resources to combat and prevent cultic manipulation. The month-long observance hopes to empower individuals, families, and communities to stand against cults through open dialogue, shared stories, educational resources, and emotional support.International Cult Awareness Month's ultimate goal is to raise awareness of cults' pervasive and insidious nature and give hope to those affected. It is a message to those entangled in these harmful practices that they are not alone, that support is available, and that they have the strength to reclaim their lives.Get in Touch or Support:Patreon - patreon.com/thecultvaultCult Vault Shop - cultvaultpodcast.com/shopCrimecon UK 2023 - https://www.crimecon.co.uk/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cultvaultpod/Twitter: https://twitter.com/CultVaultPodReddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/Cult-VaultGmail: cultvaultpodcast@gmail.com

In this miniseries I sit down with Brian and Troy, hosts of the popular podcast "I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist"We speak about the history of Pentacostalism in Australia and the world, and how the pair worked together to create a platform that is helping droves of survivors around the world. August is International Cult Awareness Month. Please visit this website to learn more, find out how you can support, calls to action and survivor resources. International Cult Awareness Month (ICAM) is when communities come together to highlight the dangers and realities of cultic practices. We hope to provide support for those affected. Every August, ICAM aims to educate the public about cults and their harmful impacts.ICAM seeks to expose the covert operations of cults, equipping individuals with the necessary knowledge and resources to combat and prevent cultic manipulation. The month-long observance hopes to empower individuals, families, and communities to stand against cults through open dialogue, shared stories, educational resources, and emotional support.International Cult Awareness Month's ultimate goal is to raise awareness of cults' pervasive and insidious nature and give hope to those affected. It is a message to those entangled in these harmful practices that they are not alone, that support is available, and that they have the strength to reclaim their lives.Get in Touch or Support:Patreon - patreon.com/thecultvaultCult Vault Shop - cultvaultpodcast.com/shopCrimecon UK 2023 - https://www.crimecon.co.uk/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cultvaultpod/Twitter: https://twitter.com/CultVaultPodReddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/Cult-VaultGmail: cultvaultpodcast@gmail.com

Essendon Football Club and pentacostalism, the Shonky Awards for 2022. Glen recounts the elections of 1922 and the Bagman continues his memoirs

PATREON MOVIE DISCUSSION:  This movie was selected by our Patreon Supporters over at the Cinematic Doctrine Patreon. Support as little as $3 a month and have your voice heard!  Frank Peretti's film adaption of Hangman's Curse arrived with an official youth devotional. Or, at least, Melvin's DVD copy did. In part two of their Hangman's Curse discussion, Melvin, Dan, and special guest Melanie Dejesus (from Melvin's church) spend time working through the official Hangman's Curse devotional guide questions, including what makes some of them so problematic. But, before they get into the spicey stuff, the three laugh over 20-year-old IMDB reviews.  Topics: Melvin feels the Online Christian Review complex is very "team jersey", in that they often celebrate and 5-star films that are otherwise quite bad or uninspired despite containing all they need: the "Christian" tag in the marketing field. Thus, he reads a few silly reviews that celebrate Hangman's Curse for being good actually. Melvin, Dan, and Melanie spend time talking about the positive and negative critical phrase, "It is/isn't realistic." and how that's sort of a silly criticism at times for movies, which aren't real to begin with. Unlike Dan's DVD which arrived barely intact, and Melanie's DVD which was new, Melvin's DVD of Hangman's Curse arrived with an official devotional partnered with the film specific for youth small groups for Christians and non-Christians alike. He summarized interesting parts into a few points. The devotional occasionally references scripture, which Melvin summarizes to save time. In addition to scripture, the angle of the Devotional is very "Assemblies of God", which means it focuses heavy on "words of death" and "words of life", among other nuanced AG Pentacostal ideologies. Daniel shares further insight here. Due to the film's subject matter, the official devotional talks about topics like bullying and suicide. Our discussion cautions heavily against what's included. Unlike the film, the devotional sure has a climax that leaves each member flabbergasted.Christian movies and stories created to be used as "ice breakers" for small groups often don't turn out very well, and at other times end up causing more damage in their depictions of various difficult topics. Ultimately, nothing competes with a genuine relationship cultivated to foster healthy discussion. SUICIDE PREVENTION HOTLINE: 988Recommendations: Spy x Family (Show)The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006) (Movie)Bring It On: Cheer or Die (2022) (Movie)Support the showSupport on Patreon for Unique Perks! Early access to uncut episodes Vote on a movie/show we review Social Links: Twitter Website Facebook Group

PATREON MOVIE DISCUSSION: This movie was selected by our Patreon Supporters over at the Cinematic Doctrine Patreon. Support as little as $3 a month and have your voice heard!  Frank Peretti's Hangman's Curse was the first of his books to finally reach the silver screen, and Melanie Dejesus from Melvin's church joins him and Daniel on this first of two episodes where the three work through this weird amalgamation of teen scream and early 2000's "cool" Christian media.  Topics: (PATREON EXCLUSIVE) 33-minute discussion of "cool" Christian media, the mid-90s to mid-00's craze of music, clothing, and all things "cool" in the western Christian world (PATREON EXCLUSIVE) Melvin proposes, since no one on the planet has seen Hangman's Curse other than Melvin' sister, that the three detail the entirety of the film from start to finish. Daniel, a self-described Frank Peretti novel-fan, details Peretti's style and talent when it comes to literature. Melvin starts describing the opening 5-minutes of the film and all three members of the show levy criticisms. Melvin also confesses that, technically speaking, Hangman's Curse is the first horror movie he remembers watching... and scaring him as a kid. The faith-based Christian theming in the film is extremely awkward and often surprising as it's almost never-expected.One can practically feel Hangman's Curse pleading to have something horrific, shocking, dramatic, or scary happen on screen, anything to bring some life to an otherwise sluggishly paced snooze-fest.As the film continued, a lightbulb went off over Daniel's head, "Wait a minute... this should have been a TV-Show!"Hangman's Curse would have been benefitted by the Hollywood "Christianity" flair of gadgets with crucifixes, weird prayers for protection, the sort of thing we're used to with the Conjuring Universe.Frank Peretti plays a full-fledged non-cameo character in Hangman's Curse, a performance that is, at the very least, memorable.Coming in at 106 minutes, Hangman's Curse truly pushes the boundaries of patience, while also including many scenes that are obvious chaff. What's nearly 2 hours could have been a 45-minute TV-Special.Passively, the Assemblies of God influence of the film is apparent through its depiction and development of the "goth" subculture within the narrative, including a few other nods and references that otherwise might be missed.SUICIDE PREVENTION HOTLINE: 988Recommendations: Spy x Family (Show)The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006) (Movie)Bring It On: Cheer or Die (2022) (Movie)Support the showSupport on Patreon for Unique Perks! Early access to uncut episodes Vote on a movie/show we review Social Links: Twitter Website Facebook Group

Starting with some of Karl Marx's thoughts on religion, we turn to the rise of Pentacostalism, the emphasis on entire sanctification and speaking in tongues as well as the ecstatic nature of "getting happy," and then examine the recordings in the mid-20s by blind singer and pianist Arizona Dranes.

Christianity's centre of gravity has shifted to the Global South. Prosperity churches, 'born again' politicians, prophets, healers and exorcists are now typical expressions of Christianity worldwide. What do these changes mean for our understanding of the world's largest religion, in particular with regard to secularism, politics, and international development? Drawing on examples from Africa, the lecture shows how these movements challenge established notions of Christian doctrine and institutional order, and how contemporary Christianity reflects the wider fragmentations and imbalances of the modern world.A lecture by Dr Jörg HausteinThe transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/africa-christianityGresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website.Website: http://www.gresham.ac.ukTwitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollegeFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollegeInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

Recurrent and capital funding of private schools show an obvious ratio of inequity.  Separation of church and state virtually non-existent. Rudd on Morrison's Pentacostalism in public office.Great State School of the week-  Victoria Road Primary School, LilydaleThank you to all those who donated to support DOGS and 3CR this radiothon. To donate online, you can go to-www.3cr.org.au/donateOr call 94198377 during business hours, Monday to Friday to pay by credit card/eftpos. Or send a cheque/money order to3CR P.O. Box 1277 Collingwood 3066To pay in person at 21 Smith St , please call in advance to allow for covid restrictions.www.adogs.info

Where do supernatural things happen? Have you experienced a supernatural event? Join us as we discuss where God wants to do supernatural things. To Connect with us click here: https://www.bethelftw.com/connect To download the App click here: https://bethel.app.link/store You can find us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/bethelftw You can find us on YouTube at https://tinyurl.com/bethelsyoutube You can visit our Online Campus at https://bethelftw.online.church To find out more about us visit: http://bethelftw.com 

Welcoming John Mark and Jory Micah to the show as they will be kicking off the next few episodes with some dialogue about an assortment of topics, today, our reaction to a Relevant Magazine article on Francis Chan’s being “on fire,” supernaturally healing everyone he touches. As each of us has changed greatly in our faith, we discuss our current view on supernatural healing. John Mark McMillan: @johnmarkmc, https://www.johnmarkmcmillan.com/ Jory Micah: @jorymicah, http://jorymicah.com/ Support this podcast: patreon.com/pwnapod Follow this podcast: FB, T and I: PWNApod Join the discussion: facebook.com/PWNAtalk Follow Joey on FB, T and I: @joeysvendsen e-mail PWNAcontact@gmail.com for correspondence. Music on this episode brought to you from: http://www.derekminor.com/ https://mechanicalriver.bandcamp.com/

In this sermon David Botts continues our series, “Cults and World Religions” by preaching on Oneness Pentacostalism from selected Scriptures. Sermon Date: 10-30-19

    Welcome to episode five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at Sister Rosetta Tharpe and “This Train” —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of Rosetta Tharpe’s music is now in the public domain, so there are a lot of compilations available. This one, at three CDs for four pounds, is probably the one to get. Almost all the information about Rosetta Tharpe’s life in this episode comes from Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald,  For more on Thomas Dorsey, check out The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church by Michael W. Harris. The Spirituals to Swing concerts are currently out of print, and the recording quality is poor enough it’s really not worth paying the silly money the CDs go for second hand. But if you want to do that, you can find them here. And Rosetta Tharpe’s performance at Wilbraham Road Railway Station can be found on The American Folk Blues Festival: The British Tours 1963-1966 Transcript One of the problems when dealing with the history of rock and roll, as we touched upon the other week in the brief disclaimer episode, is the way it’s dominated by men. Indeed, the story of rock and roll is the story of men crowding out women, and white men crowding out black men, and finally of rich white men crowding out poorer white men, until it eventually becomes a dull, conservative genre. Sorry if that’s a spoiler, but don’t say I didn’t warn you when I get to the nineties.   But one black woman is as responsible as anyone for the style of rock and roll, and in particular, for its focus on the guitar.   To find out why, we’re going to be making our final trip back to 1938 and Carnegie Hall.   We’ve talked in earlier episodes about John Hammond’s legendary Spirituals to Swing concerts, and at the time I said that I’d talk some more about the ways in which they were important, but also about how they were problematic. (I know that’s a word that gets overused these days, but I mean it literally — they had problems, but weren’t all bad. Far from it).   One of the most problematic aspects of them, indeed, is encoded in the name. “From Spirituals to Swing”. It gives you a nice, simple, linear narrative — one that was still being pushed in books I read in the 1980s. You start with the spirituals and you end with swing. It’s like those diagrams of the evolution of man, with the crawling monkey on one side and the tall, oddly hairless, white man with his genitals carefully concealed on the other.   The fact is, most of the narrative about “primitive” music — a narrative that was put forward by very progressive white men like John Hammond or the Lomaxes — is deeply mistaken. The forms of music made largely by black people could sound less sophisticated in the 1930s, but that wasn’t because they were atavistic survivals of more primitive forms, musical coelacanths dredged up from the depths to parade. It was because the people making the music often couldn’t afford expensive instruments, and were recorded on cheaper equipment, and all the other myriad ways society makes the lives of black people, and underprivileged people in other ways, just that bit more difficult.   But this was, nonetheless, the narrative that was current in the 1930s. And so the Spirituals to Swing concerts featured a bisexual black woman who basically invented much of what would become rock guitar, an innovator if ever there was one, but portrayed her as somehow less sophisticated than the big band music on the same bill. And they did that because that innovative black woman was playing religious music.   In fact, black gospel music had grown up around the same time as the big bands. Black people had, of course, been singing in churches since their ancestors were forcibly converted to Christianity, but gospel music as we talk about it now was largely the creation of one man — Thomas Dorsey.   (This is not the same man as the white bandleader Tommy Dorsey who we’ve mentioned a couple of times earlier).   Dorsey was a blues and jazz musician, who had led the band for Ma Rainey, one of the great early blues singers, and under the name “Georgia Tom” he’d collaborated with Tampa Red on a series of singles. Their song “It’s Tight Like That”, from 1928, is one of the earliest hokum records, and is largely responsible for a lot of the cliches of the form — and it sold seven million copies.   [excerpt of “It’s Tight Like That”]   That record, in itself, is one of the most important records that has ever been made — you can trace from that song, through hokum blues, through R&B, and find its influence in basically every record made by a black American, or by anyone who’s ever listened to a record made by a black American, since then. If Dorsey had only made that one record, he would have been one of the most important figures in music history.   But some time around 1930, he also started writing a whole new style of music. It combined the themes, and some of the melody, of traditional Christian hymns, with the feel of the blues and jazz music he’d been playing. It’s rare that you can talk about a single person inventing a whole field of music, but gospel music as we know it basically *was* invented by Thomas Dorsey.    Other people had performed gospel music before, of course, but the style was very different from anything we now think of as gospel. Dorsey was the one who pulled all the popular music idioms into it and made it into something that powered and inspired all the popular music since.   He did this because he was so torn between his faith and his work as a blues musician that he had multiple breakdowns — at one point finding himself on stage with Ma Rainey and completely unable to move his fingers to play the piano. While he continued parallel careers for a while, eventually he settled on making religious music. And the songs he wrote include some of the most well-known songs of all time, like “Peace in the Valley” and “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”.   That’s a song he wrote in 1932, after his wife died in childbirth and his newborn son died a couple of days later. He was feeling a grief that most of us could never imagine, a pain that must have been more unbearable than anything anyone should have to suffer, and the pain came out in beauty like this:   [excerpt of Rosetta Tharpe singing “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”]   That’s not “primitive” music. That’s not music that is unsophisticated. That’s not some form of folk art. That’s one man, a man who personally revolutionised music multiple times over, writing about his own personal grief and creating something that stands as great art without having to be patronised or given special consideration.   And the person singing on that recording is Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who, like Dorsey, is someone who doesn’t need to be given special treatment or be thought of as good considering her disadvantages or any of that patronising nonsense. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was one of the great singers of her generation, and one of the great guitar players of all time. And she was making music that was as modern and cutting-edge as anything else made in the 1930s and 40s. She wasn’t making music that was a remnant of something that would evolve into swing, no matter what John Hammond thought, she was making important music, and music that would in the long run be seen as far more important than most of the swing bands.   Obviously, one should not judge Hammond too harshly. He was from another time. A primitive.   Sister Rosetta was brought up in, and spent her life singing for, the Church of God in Christ. As many of my listeners are in Europe, as I am myself, it’s probably worth explaining what this church is, because while it does have branches outside the US, that’s where it’s based, and that’s where most of its membership is.   The Church of God in Christ is a Pentecostal church, and it’s the largest Pentacostal church in the US, and the fifth-largest church full stop. I mention that it’s a Pentacostal church, because that’s something you need to understand to understand Rosetta Tharpe. Pentacostals believe in something slightly different to what most other Christian denominations believe.    Before I go any further, I should point out that I am *not* an expert in theology by any means, and that what I’m going to say may well be a mischaracterisation. If you’re a Pentacostal and disagree with my characterisation of your religion here, I apologise, and if you let me know I’ll at least update the show notes. No disrespect is intended.   While most Christians believe that humanity is always tainted by original sin, Pentacostals believe that it is possible for some people, if they truly believe — if they’re “born again” to use a term that’s a little more widespread than just Pentacostalism — to become truly holy. Those people will have all their past sins forgiven, and will then be sinless on Earth. To do this, you have to be “baptised in the Holy Ghost”. This is different from normal baptism, what Pentacostals call “water baptism” — though most Pentacostals think you should be water baptised anyway, as a precursor to the main event. Rather, this is the Holy Spirit descending from Heaven and entering you, filling you with joy and a sense of sanctity. This can often cause speaking in tongues and other strange behaviours, as people are enthused (a word which, in the original Greek, actually meant a god entering into you), and once this has happened you have the tendency to sin removed from you altogether.    This is all based on the Acts of the Apostles, specifically Acts 2:4, which describes how at the Pentecost (which is the seventh Sunday after Easter), “All were filled with the Holy Spirit. They began to express themselves in foreign tongues and make bold proclamation as the Spirit prompted them”.   Unlike many Protestant denominations, which adhere to Calvinist beliefs that nobody can know if they’re going to Heaven or Hell, and that only God can ever know this, and that nothing you do can make a difference to your chances, most Pentacostals believe that you can definitely tell whether you’re going to Heaven. You’re going to Heaven once you’re sanctified by the Holy Spirit, and that’s an end of it.   At least, it’s an end of it so long as you continue with what’s called “outward holiness”, and so you have to dress conservatively, to avoid swearing, to avoid drinking or gambling or smoking, or dancing suggestively, or wearing makeup. If you do that, once the spirit’s entered into you, you’re going to remain holy and free from temptation. If you don’t do that, well, then the Devil might get you after all.   This is a very real fear for many Pentacostals, who have a belief in a literal heaven and hell. And it’s a fear that has inspired a *lot* of the most important musicians in rock and roll. But Pentacostalism isn’t just about fear and living right, it’s also about that feeling of elation and exhiliration when the holy spirit enters you. And music helps bring that feeling about.    It’s no surprise that a lot of the early rock and rollers went to Pentacostal churches — at many of them, especially in the South of the US, there’s a culture of absolutely wild, unrestrained, passionate music and dancing, to get people into the mood to have the spirit enter them. And Sister Rosetta Tharpe is probably the greatest performer to come out of those churches.   But while most of the performers we’ll be looking at started playing secular music, Sister Rosetta never did, or at least very rarely. But she was, nonetheless, an example of something that we’ll see a lot in the history of rock — the pull between the spiritual and the worldly.    From the very start of her career, Sister Rosetta was slightly different from the other gospel performers. While she lived in Chicago at the same time as Thomas Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson, she isn’t generally considered part of the gospel scene that they were at the centre of — because she was travelling round the country playing at revival meetings, rather than staying in one place. When her first marriage — to a fellow evangelist, who apparently abused her — broke up, she moved on to New York, and there she started playing to audiences that were very different from the churches she was used to.   Where people like Mahalia were playing church music for church people, Rosetta Tharpe was taking the gospel to the sinners. Throughout her career, she played in nightclubs and theatres, playing for any audience that would have her, and playing music that got them excited and dancing, even as she was singing about holiness.   She started playing the Cotton Club in 1938. The Cotton Club was the most famous club in New York, though in 1938 it was on its last days of relevance. It had been located in Harlem until 1936, but after riots in Harlem, it had moved to a more respectable area, and was now on Broadway.   In the twenties and early thirties, the Cotton Club had been responsible for the success of both Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, though only Calloway was still playing there regularly by the time Rosetta Tharpe started performing there. It was still, though, the place to be seen — at least if you were white. The Cotton Club was strictly segregated — only black people on stage, but only white people in the audience. The black performers were there to be leered at, in the case of the showgirls, or to play up to black stereotypes. Even Duke Ellington, possibly the most sophisticated musician ever to come out of the United States, had been presented as a “jungle musician”. The name itself — the Cotton Club — was trading on associations with slavery and cotton picking, and the feel of the new venue could probably be summed up by the fact that it had, on its walls, pictures of famous white bandleaders in blackface.   So it’s not surprising that the performances that Sister Rosetta did at the Cotton Club were very different from the ones she’d been doing when she was travelling the country with her mother performing to church crowds. She was still playing the same music, of course — in fact, over her career, she mostly stuck to the same quite small repertoire, rerecording the same material in new arrangements and with new emphases as she grew as an artist — but now she was doing it as part of a parody of the very kind of church service she had grown up in and devoted her life to, with dancers pretending to be “Holy Rollers”, mocking her religion even as her music itself was still devoted to it.   Originally, she was only taken on at the Cotton Club as a sort of trial, on a two-week engagement — and apparently she thought the manager was joking when she was offered five hundred dollars a week, not believing she could be making that much money — and her role was simply to be one of many acts who’d come on and do a song or two between the bigger acts who were given star billing. But she soon became a hit, and she soon got signed to Decca to make records.   Her first record was, of course, a song by Thomas Dorsey, originally titled “Hide Me in Thy Bosom” but given the newer title “Rock Me” by Tharpe. Her arrangement largely stuck to Dorsey’s original, with one important exception — where he had written “singing”, Tharpe sang “swinging”.   [excerpt of “Rock Me”]   Many people also claimed to hear a double entendre in the lyrics to “Rock Me”, and to think the song was about more worldly matters than Dorsey had intended. Whether Tharpe thought that or not, it almost certainly factored into the decision to make it her first single.   When she was booked to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, she performed both that song and “That’s All”, backed by Albert Ammons, one of the boogie woogie players who also appeared on the bill, and in the recording of that we can hear, rather better than in the studio recording, the raw power of Tharpe’s performance.   [excerpt of “That’s All” from Carnegie Hall]   The sound quality of these recordings isn’t great, of course, but you can clearly hear the enthusiasm in that performance.   Tharpe’s performances at the Cotton Club drew a great deal of attention, and Time magazine even did a feature on her, and how she “Swings Same Songs in Church and Night Club.” When the Cotton Club shut down she moved on to the Cafe Society, a venue booked by John Hammond, which was an integrated club and which fit her rather better.   While she was working there, she came to the attention of Lucky Millinder, the big band leader. Different people have different ideas as to how the two started working together — Mo Gale, Millinder’s manager, was also Chick Webb’s manager, and claimed that it was his idea and that he’d seen Tharpe as being an Ella Fitzgerald to Millinder’s Chick Webb, but Bill Doggett, the piano player with Millinder’s band, said that it was Millinder’s idea, not Gale’s, to get Tharpe on board.   Either way, the combination worked well enough at first, as Tharpe got to sing the same songs she’d been performing earlier — her gospel repertoire — but with a big band backing her. She’d also switched to playing an electric guitar rather than an acoustic, and the effect on her guitar playing was extraordinary — where before she’d had to be a busy accompanist, constantly playing new notes due to the lack of sustain from an acoustic guitar, now she was able to play single-note lead lines and rely on the orchestra to provide the chordal pad.   Her remake of “Rock Me” with Millinder’s band, from 1941, shows just how much her artistry had improved in just three years:   [excerpt of 1941 “Rock Me”]   With that record, she more or less invented the guitar style that T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, and others would adapt for themselves. That’s just how you play electric blues now, but it wasn’t how anyone played before Rosetta Tharpe.   Soon after she joined Millinder’s band they moved to a residency at the Savoy Ballroom, and became one of the most popular bands for dancers in New York — regulars there included a young man known as Detroit Red, who later changed his name to Malcolm X.  The Savoy Ballroom was closed down not long after — allegedly for prostitution, but more likely because it allowed white women to dance with black men, and the city of New York wouldn’t allow that — although as Malcolm X said, it wasn’t as if they were dragging the white women in there.   However, Millinder’s band was an odd fit for Rosetta Tharpe, and she was increasingly forced to sing secular numbers along with the gospel music she loved. There were plenty of good things about the band, of course — she became lifelong friends with its young trumpet player, Dizzy Gillespie, for example, and she enjoyed a tour where they were on the same bill as a young vocal group, The Four Ink Spots, but she was a little bit uncomfortable singing songs like “Tall Skinny Papa”, which wasn’t particularly gospel-like   [excerpt “Tall Skinny Papa”]   And it’s not particularly likely that she was keen on the follow-up, although she didn’t sing on that one.   [excerpt “Big Fat Mama”]   So eventually, she quit the Millinder band, without giving notice, and went back to performing entirely solo, at least at first.    This was in the middle of the musicians’ union strike, but when that ended, Tharpe was back in the studio, and in September 1944 she began one of the two most important musical collaborations of her career, when she recorded “Strange Things Happening Every Day”, with Sam Price on piano.   Sam Price did *not* get along with Tharpe. He insisted on her playing with a capo, because she was playing in an open tuning and wasn’t playing in a normal jazz key. He didn’t like the idea of combining gospel music with his boogie woogie style (eventually he was persuaded by Tharpe’s mother, a gospel star in her own right who was by all accounts a fearsome and intimidating presence, that this was OK), and when the result became a massive hit, he resented that he got a flat fee.   But nonetheless, “Strange Things Happening Every Day” marks out the start of yet another new style for Tharpe — and it’s yet another song often credited as “the first rock and roll record”.   [Excerpt “Strange Things Happening Every Day”]   Shortly after this, Tharpe started working with another gospel singer, Marie Knight. Her partnership with Marie Knight may have been a partnership in more than one sense. Knight denied the relationship to the end of her days — and it’s entirely understandable that she would, given that she was a gospel singer who was devoted to a particularly conservative church, and whose career also depended on that church — but their relationship was regarded as an open secret within the gospel music community, which had a rather more relaxed attitude to homosexuality and bisexuality than the rest of the church. Some of Tharpe’s friends have described her as a secret lesbian, but given her multiple marriages to men it seems more likely that she was bi — although of course we will never know for sure.   Either way, Tharpe and Knight were a successful double act for many years, with their voices combining perfectly to provide a gospel vocal sound that was unlike anything ever recorded. They stopped working together in 1950, but remained close enough that Knight was in charge of Tharpe’s funeral in 1973,   The two of them toured together — and Tharpe toured later on her own — in their own bus, which was driven by a white man. This gave them a number of advantages in a deeply segregated and racist country. It was considered acceptable for them to go into some public places where they otherwise wouldn’t have been allowed, because they were with a white man — if a black woman was with a white man, it was just assumed that she was sleeping with him, and unlike a white woman sleeping with a black man, this was considered absolutely acceptable, a sexual double-standard that dated back to slavery. If they needed food and the restaurant in a town was whites-only, they could send the white driver in to get them takeout. And if it came to it, if there was no hotel in town that would take black people, they could sleep on the bus.   And segregation was so accepted at the time by so many people that even when Tharpe toured with a white vocal group, the Jordanaires (who would later find more fame backing up some country singer named Elvis something) they just thought her having her own bus was cool, and didn’t even make the connection to how necessary it was for her.   While Tharpe and Knight made many great records together, probably Tharpe’s most important recording was a solo B-side to one of their singles, a 1947 remake of a song she’d first recorded in 1938, “This Train”, again featuring Sam Price on piano:   [excerpt “This Train”]   That’s a song that sets out the theology of the Pentacostal church as well as you’ll ever hear it. This train is a *clean* train. You want to ride it you better get redeemed. No tobacco chewers or cigar smokers. No crap shooters. If you want to be bound for glory, you need to act holy.   There was no-one bigger than Tharpe in her genre. She is probably the first person to ever play rock and roll guitar in stadiums — and not only that, she played rock and roll guitar in a stadium *at her wedding* — her third wedding, to be precise, which took place at Griffith Stadium, the home of the Washington Senators and the Homestead Grays. Twenty thousand people came to see her get married and perform a gospel show afterwards, concluding with fireworks that first exploded in the shape of Tharpe playing her guitar before taking on other shapes like two hearts pierced with Cupid’s arrow. Even Tharpe’s half-sister had to pay for her ticket to the show. Apparently Tharpe signed the contract for her wedding seven months earlier, and then went out to find herself a husband.   Rosetta Tharpe’s popularity started to wane in the 1950s, at least in her home country, but she retained a following in Europe. There’s fascinating footage of her in 1964 filmed by Granada TV, playing at the abandoned Wilbraham Road railway station in Manchester. If you live in Manchester, as I do, that piece of track, which is now part of the Fallowfield cycle loop was the place where some of the greats of black American music were filmed for what may have been the greatest blues TV programme of all time — along with Tharpe, there was Muddy Waters, Otis Span, Reverend Gary Davis, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, all performing in the open air in Manchester in front of an extremely earnest audience of young white British people. Fittingly for an open-air show in Manchester, Tharpe opened her short set with “Didn’t It Rain”   [Didn’t It Rain TV performance excerpt]   By that time, Tharpe had become primarily known as a blues musician, even though she was still doing the same thing she’d always been doing, simply because music had moved on and recategorised her. But she’d had an influence on blues, R&B, and rock and roll music that most people didn’t even realise. “This Train” was not written by Tharpe, exactly — it dates back to the 1920s — but it was definitely her version, and her rewrite, that inspired one of the most important blues records of all time:   [Excerpt of “My Babe”]   Indeed, only a few months after Rosetta Tharpe’s UK performances, Gerry and the Pacemakers, one of the biggest bands of the new Merseybeat sound, who’d had three number one records that year in the UK, were recording their own version of “My Babe”. Gerry and the Pacemakers were, in most respects, as far as you could imagine from gospel music, and yet the connection is there, closer than you’d think.   Rosetta Tharpe died in 1973, and never really got the recognition she deserved. She was only inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame last year. But if you’ve ever liked rock guitar, you’ve got her to thank. Shout, Sister, Shout!   Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

    Welcome to episode five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Sister Rosetta Tharpe and "This Train" ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of Rosetta Tharpe's music is now in the public domain, so there are a lot of compilations available. This one, at three CDs for four pounds, is probably the one to get. Almost all the information about Rosetta Tharpe's life in this episode comes from Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe by Gayle F Wald,  For more on Thomas Dorsey, check out The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church by Michael W. Harris. The Spirituals to Swing concerts are currently out of print, and the recording quality is poor enough it's really not worth paying the silly money the CDs go for second hand. But if you want to do that, you can find them here. And Rosetta Tharpe's performance at Wilbraham Road Railway Station can be found on The American Folk Blues Festival: The British Tours 1963-1966 Transcript One of the problems when dealing with the history of rock and roll, as we touched upon the other week in the brief disclaimer episode, is the way it's dominated by men. Indeed, the story of rock and roll is the story of men crowding out women, and white men crowding out black men, and finally of rich white men crowding out poorer white men, until it eventually becomes a dull, conservative genre. Sorry if that's a spoiler, but don't say I didn't warn you when I get to the nineties.   But one black woman is as responsible as anyone for the style of rock and roll, and in particular, for its focus on the guitar.   To find out why, we're going to be making our final trip back to 1938 and Carnegie Hall.   We've talked in earlier episodes about John Hammond's legendary Spirituals to Swing concerts, and at the time I said that I'd talk some more about the ways in which they were important, but also about how they were problematic. (I know that's a word that gets overused these days, but I mean it literally -- they had problems, but weren't all bad. Far from it).   One of the most problematic aspects of them, indeed, is encoded in the name. "From Spirituals to Swing". It gives you a nice, simple, linear narrative -- one that was still being pushed in books I read in the 1980s. You start with the spirituals and you end with swing. It's like those diagrams of the evolution of man, with the crawling monkey on one side and the tall, oddly hairless, white man with his genitals carefully concealed on the other.   The fact is, most of the narrative about "primitive" music -- a narrative that was put forward by very progressive white men like John Hammond or the Lomaxes -- is deeply mistaken. The forms of music made largely by black people could sound less sophisticated in the 1930s, but that wasn't because they were atavistic survivals of more primitive forms, musical coelacanths dredged up from the depths to parade. It was because the people making the music often couldn't afford expensive instruments, and were recorded on cheaper equipment, and all the other myriad ways society makes the lives of black people, and underprivileged people in other ways, just that bit more difficult.   But this was, nonetheless, the narrative that was current in the 1930s. And so the Spirituals to Swing concerts featured a bisexual black woman who basically invented much of what would become rock guitar, an innovator if ever there was one, but portrayed her as somehow less sophisticated than the big band music on the same bill. And they did that because that innovative black woman was playing religious music.   In fact, black gospel music had grown up around the same time as the big bands. Black people had, of course, been singing in churches since their ancestors were forcibly converted to Christianity, but gospel music as we talk about it now was largely the creation of one man -- Thomas Dorsey.   (This is not the same man as the white bandleader Tommy Dorsey who we've mentioned a couple of times earlier).   Dorsey was a blues and jazz musician, who had led the band for Ma Rainey, one of the great early blues singers, and under the name "Georgia Tom" he'd collaborated with Tampa Red on a series of singles. Their song "It's Tight Like That", from 1928, is one of the earliest hokum records, and is largely responsible for a lot of the cliches of the form -- and it sold seven million copies.   [excerpt of "It's Tight Like That"]   That record, in itself, is one of the most important records that has ever been made -- you can trace from that song, through hokum blues, through R&B, and find its influence in basically every record made by a black American, or by anyone who's ever listened to a record made by a black American, since then. If Dorsey had only made that one record, he would have been one of the most important figures in music history.   But some time around 1930, he also started writing a whole new style of music. It combined the themes, and some of the melody, of traditional Christian hymns, with the feel of the blues and jazz music he'd been playing. It's rare that you can talk about a single person inventing a whole field of music, but gospel music as we know it basically *was* invented by Thomas Dorsey.    Other people had performed gospel music before, of course, but the style was very different from anything we now think of as gospel. Dorsey was the one who pulled all the popular music idioms into it and made it into something that powered and inspired all the popular music since.   He did this because he was so torn between his faith and his work as a blues musician that he had multiple breakdowns -- at one point finding himself on stage with Ma Rainey and completely unable to move his fingers to play the piano. While he continued parallel careers for a while, eventually he settled on making religious music. And the songs he wrote include some of the most well-known songs of all time, like "Peace in the Valley" and "Take My Hand, Precious Lord".   That's a song he wrote in 1932, after his wife died in childbirth and his newborn son died a couple of days later. He was feeling a grief that most of us could never imagine, a pain that must have been more unbearable than anything anyone should have to suffer, and the pain came out in beauty like this:   [excerpt of Rosetta Tharpe singing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord"]   That's not "primitive" music. That's not music that is unsophisticated. That's not some form of folk art. That's one man, a man who personally revolutionised music multiple times over, writing about his own personal grief and creating something that stands as great art without having to be patronised or given special consideration.   And the person singing on that recording is Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who, like Dorsey, is someone who doesn't need to be given special treatment or be thought of as good considering her disadvantages or any of that patronising nonsense. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was one of the great singers of her generation, and one of the great guitar players of all time. And she was making music that was as modern and cutting-edge as anything else made in the 1930s and 40s. She wasn't making music that was a remnant of something that would evolve into swing, no matter what John Hammond thought, she was making important music, and music that would in the long run be seen as far more important than most of the swing bands.   Obviously, one should not judge Hammond too harshly. He was from another time. A primitive.   Sister Rosetta was brought up in, and spent her life singing for, the Church of God in Christ. As many of my listeners are in Europe, as I am myself, it's probably worth explaining what this church is, because while it does have branches outside the US, that's where it's based, and that's where most of its membership is.   The Church of God in Christ is a Pentecostal church, and it's the largest Pentacostal church in the US, and the fifth-largest church full stop. I mention that it's a Pentacostal church, because that's something you need to understand to understand Rosetta Tharpe. Pentacostals believe in something slightly different to what most other Christian denominations believe.    Before I go any further, I should point out that I am *not* an expert in theology by any means, and that what I'm going to say may well be a mischaracterisation. If you're a Pentacostal and disagree with my characterisation of your religion here, I apologise, and if you let me know I'll at least update the show notes. No disrespect is intended.   While most Christians believe that humanity is always tainted by original sin, Pentacostals believe that it is possible for some people, if they truly believe -- if they're "born again" to use a term that's a little more widespread than just Pentacostalism -- to become truly holy. Those people will have all their past sins forgiven, and will then be sinless on Earth. To do this, you have to be "baptised in the Holy Ghost". This is different from normal baptism, what Pentacostals call "water baptism" -- though most Pentacostals think you should be water baptised anyway, as a precursor to the main event. Rather, this is the Holy Spirit descending from Heaven and entering you, filling you with joy and a sense of sanctity. This can often cause speaking in tongues and other strange behaviours, as people are enthused (a word which, in the original Greek, actually meant a god entering into you), and once this has happened you have the tendency to sin removed from you altogether.    This is all based on the Acts of the Apostles, specifically Acts 2:4, which describes how at the Pentecost (which is the seventh Sunday after Easter), "All were filled with the Holy Spirit. They began to express themselves in foreign tongues and make bold proclamation as the Spirit prompted them".   Unlike many Protestant denominations, which adhere to Calvinist beliefs that nobody can know if they're going to Heaven or Hell, and that only God can ever know this, and that nothing you do can make a difference to your chances, most Pentacostals believe that you can definitely tell whether you're going to Heaven. You're going to Heaven once you're sanctified by the Holy Spirit, and that's an end of it.   At least, it's an end of it so long as you continue with what's called "outward holiness", and so you have to dress conservatively, to avoid swearing, to avoid drinking or gambling or smoking, or dancing suggestively, or wearing makeup. If you do that, once the spirit's entered into you, you're going to remain holy and free from temptation. If you don't do that, well, then the Devil might get you after all.   This is a very real fear for many Pentacostals, who have a belief in a literal heaven and hell. And it's a fear that has inspired a *lot* of the most important musicians in rock and roll. But Pentacostalism isn't just about fear and living right, it's also about that feeling of elation and exhiliration when the holy spirit enters you. And music helps bring that feeling about.    It's no surprise that a lot of the early rock and rollers went to Pentacostal churches -- at many of them, especially in the South of the US, there's a culture of absolutely wild, unrestrained, passionate music and dancing, to get people into the mood to have the spirit enter them. And Sister Rosetta Tharpe is probably the greatest performer to come out of those churches.   But while most of the performers we'll be looking at started playing secular music, Sister Rosetta never did, or at least very rarely. But she was, nonetheless, an example of something that we'll see a lot in the history of rock -- the pull between the spiritual and the worldly.    From the very start of her career, Sister Rosetta was slightly different from the other gospel performers. While she lived in Chicago at the same time as Thomas Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson, she isn't generally considered part of the gospel scene that they were at the centre of -- because she was travelling round the country playing at revival meetings, rather than staying in one place. When her first marriage -- to a fellow evangelist, who apparently abused her -- broke up, she moved on to New York, and there she started playing to audiences that were very different from the churches she was used to.   Where people like Mahalia were playing church music for church people, Rosetta Tharpe was taking the gospel to the sinners. Throughout her career, she played in nightclubs and theatres, playing for any audience that would have her, and playing music that got them excited and dancing, even as she was singing about holiness.   She started playing the Cotton Club in 1938. The Cotton Club was the most famous club in New York, though in 1938 it was on its last days of relevance. It had been located in Harlem until 1936, but after riots in Harlem, it had moved to a more respectable area, and was now on Broadway.   In the twenties and early thirties, the Cotton Club had been responsible for the success of both Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, though only Calloway was still playing there regularly by the time Rosetta Tharpe started performing there. It was still, though, the place to be seen -- at least if you were white. The Cotton Club was strictly segregated -- only black people on stage, but only white people in the audience. The black performers were there to be leered at, in the case of the showgirls, or to play up to black stereotypes. Even Duke Ellington, possibly the most sophisticated musician ever to come out of the United States, had been presented as a "jungle musician". The name itself -- the Cotton Club -- was trading on associations with slavery and cotton picking, and the feel of the new venue could probably be summed up by the fact that it had, on its walls, pictures of famous white bandleaders in blackface.   So it's not surprising that the performances that Sister Rosetta did at the Cotton Club were very different from the ones she'd been doing when she was travelling the country with her mother performing to church crowds. She was still playing the same music, of course -- in fact, over her career, she mostly stuck to the same quite small repertoire, rerecording the same material in new arrangements and with new emphases as she grew as an artist -- but now she was doing it as part of a parody of the very kind of church service she had grown up in and devoted her life to, with dancers pretending to be "Holy Rollers", mocking her religion even as her music itself was still devoted to it.   Originally, she was only taken on at the Cotton Club as a sort of trial, on a two-week engagement -- and apparently she thought the manager was joking when she was offered five hundred dollars a week, not believing she could be making that much money -- and her role was simply to be one of many acts who'd come on and do a song or two between the bigger acts who were given star billing. But she soon became a hit, and she soon got signed to Decca to make records.   Her first record was, of course, a song by Thomas Dorsey, originally titled "Hide Me in Thy Bosom" but given the newer title "Rock Me" by Tharpe. Her arrangement largely stuck to Dorsey's original, with one important exception -- where he had written "singing", Tharpe sang "swinging".   [excerpt of "Rock Me"]   Many people also claimed to hear a double entendre in the lyrics to "Rock Me", and to think the song was about more worldly matters than Dorsey had intended. Whether Tharpe thought that or not, it almost certainly factored into the decision to make it her first single.   When she was booked to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, she performed both that song and "That's All", backed by Albert Ammons, one of the boogie woogie players who also appeared on the bill, and in the recording of that we can hear, rather better than in the studio recording, the raw power of Tharpe's performance.   [excerpt of "That's All" from Carnegie Hall]   The sound quality of these recordings isn't great, of course, but you can clearly hear the enthusiasm in that performance.   Tharpe's performances at the Cotton Club drew a great deal of attention, and Time magazine even did a feature on her, and how she “Swings Same Songs in Church and Night Club.” When the Cotton Club shut down she moved on to the Cafe Society, a venue booked by John Hammond, which was an integrated club and which fit her rather better.   While she was working there, she came to the attention of Lucky Millinder, the big band leader. Different people have different ideas as to how the two started working together -- Mo Gale, Millinder's manager, was also Chick Webb's manager, and claimed that it was his idea and that he'd seen Tharpe as being an Ella Fitzgerald to Millinder's Chick Webb, but Bill Doggett, the piano player with Millinder's band, said that it was Millinder's idea, not Gale's, to get Tharpe on board.   Either way, the combination worked well enough at first, as Tharpe got to sing the same songs she'd been performing earlier -- her gospel repertoire -- but with a big band backing her. She'd also switched to playing an electric guitar rather than an acoustic, and the effect on her guitar playing was extraordinary -- where before she'd had to be a busy accompanist, constantly playing new notes due to the lack of sustain from an acoustic guitar, now she was able to play single-note lead lines and rely on the orchestra to provide the chordal pad.   Her remake of "Rock Me" with Millinder's band, from 1941, shows just how much her artistry had improved in just three years:   [excerpt of 1941 "Rock Me"]   With that record, she more or less invented the guitar style that T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, and others would adapt for themselves. That's just how you play electric blues now, but it wasn't how anyone played before Rosetta Tharpe.   Soon after she joined Millinder's band they moved to a residency at the Savoy Ballroom, and became one of the most popular bands for dancers in New York -- regulars there included a young man known as Detroit Red, who later changed his name to Malcolm X.  The Savoy Ballroom was closed down not long after -- allegedly for prostitution, but more likely because it allowed white women to dance with black men, and the city of New York wouldn't allow that -- although as Malcolm X said, it wasn't as if they were dragging the white women in there.   However, Millinder's band was an odd fit for Rosetta Tharpe, and she was increasingly forced to sing secular numbers along with the gospel music she loved. There were plenty of good things about the band, of course -- she became lifelong friends with its young trumpet player, Dizzy Gillespie, for example, and she enjoyed a tour where they were on the same bill as a young vocal group, The Four Ink Spots, but she was a little bit uncomfortable singing songs like "Tall Skinny Papa", which wasn't particularly gospel-like   [excerpt "Tall Skinny Papa"]   And it's not particularly likely that she was keen on the follow-up, although she didn't sing on that one.   [excerpt "Big Fat Mama"]   So eventually, she quit the Millinder band, without giving notice, and went back to performing entirely solo, at least at first.    This was in the middle of the musicians' union strike, but when that ended, Tharpe was back in the studio, and in September 1944 she began one of the two most important musical collaborations of her career, when she recorded "Strange Things Happening Every Day", with Sam Price on piano.   Sam Price did *not* get along with Tharpe. He insisted on her playing with a capo, because she was playing in an open tuning and wasn't playing in a normal jazz key. He didn't like the idea of combining gospel music with his boogie woogie style (eventually he was persuaded by Tharpe's mother, a gospel star in her own right who was by all accounts a fearsome and intimidating presence, that this was OK), and when the result became a massive hit, he resented that he got a flat fee.   But nonetheless, "Strange Things Happening Every Day" marks out the start of yet another new style for Tharpe -- and it's yet another song often credited as "the first rock and roll record".   [Excerpt "Strange Things Happening Every Day"]   Shortly after this, Tharpe started working with another gospel singer, Marie Knight. Her partnership with Marie Knight may have been a partnership in more than one sense. Knight denied the relationship to the end of her days -- and it's entirely understandable that she would, given that she was a gospel singer who was devoted to a particularly conservative church, and whose career also depended on that church -- but their relationship was regarded as an open secret within the gospel music community, which had a rather more relaxed attitude to homosexuality and bisexuality than the rest of the church. Some of Tharpe's friends have described her as a secret lesbian, but given her multiple marriages to men it seems more likely that she was bi -- although of course we will never know for sure.   Either way, Tharpe and Knight were a successful double act for many years, with their voices combining perfectly to provide a gospel vocal sound that was unlike anything ever recorded. They stopped working together in 1950, but remained close enough that Knight was in charge of Tharpe's funeral in 1973,   The two of them toured together -- and Tharpe toured later on her own -- in their own bus, which was driven by a white man. This gave them a number of advantages in a deeply segregated and racist country. It was considered acceptable for them to go into some public places where they otherwise wouldn't have been allowed, because they were with a white man -- if a black woman was with a white man, it was just assumed that she was sleeping with him, and unlike a white woman sleeping with a black man, this was considered absolutely acceptable, a sexual double-standard that dated back to slavery. If they needed food and the restaurant in a town was whites-only, they could send the white driver in to get them takeout. And if it came to it, if there was no hotel in town that would take black people, they could sleep on the bus.   And segregation was so accepted at the time by so many people that even when Tharpe toured with a white vocal group, the Jordanaires (who would later find more fame backing up some country singer named Elvis something) they just thought her having her own bus was cool, and didn't even make the connection to how necessary it was for her.   While Tharpe and Knight made many great records together, probably Tharpe's most important recording was a solo B-side to one of their singles, a 1947 remake of a song she'd first recorded in 1938, "This Train", again featuring Sam Price on piano:   [excerpt "This Train"]   That's a song that sets out the theology of the Pentacostal church as well as you'll ever hear it. This train is a *clean* train. You want to ride it you better get redeemed. No tobacco chewers or cigar smokers. No crap shooters. If you want to be bound for glory, you need to act holy.   There was no-one bigger than Tharpe in her genre. She is probably the first person to ever play rock and roll guitar in stadiums -- and not only that, she played rock and roll guitar in a stadium *at her wedding* -- her third wedding, to be precise, which took place at Griffith Stadium, the home of the Washington Senators and the Homestead Grays. Twenty thousand people came to see her get married and perform a gospel show afterwards, concluding with fireworks that first exploded in the shape of Tharpe playing her guitar before taking on other shapes like two hearts pierced with Cupid's arrow. Even Tharpe's half-sister had to pay for her ticket to the show. Apparently Tharpe signed the contract for her wedding seven months earlier, and then went out to find herself a husband.   Rosetta Tharpe's popularity started to wane in the 1950s, at least in her home country, but she retained a following in Europe. There's fascinating footage of her in 1964 filmed by Granada TV, playing at the abandoned Wilbraham Road railway station in Manchester. If you live in Manchester, as I do, that piece of track, which is now part of the Fallowfield cycle loop was the place where some of the greats of black American music were filmed for what may have been the greatest blues TV programme of all time -- along with Tharpe, there was Muddy Waters, Otis Span, Reverend Gary Davis, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, all performing in the open air in Manchester in front of an extremely earnest audience of young white British people. Fittingly for an open-air show in Manchester, Tharpe opened her short set with "Didn't It Rain"   [Didn't It Rain TV performance excerpt]   By that time, Tharpe had become primarily known as a blues musician, even though she was still doing the same thing she'd always been doing, simply because music had moved on and recategorised her. But she'd had an influence on blues, R&B, and rock and roll music that most people didn't even realise. "This Train" was not written by Tharpe, exactly -- it dates back to the 1920s -- but it was definitely her version, and her rewrite, that inspired one of the most important blues records of all time:   [Excerpt of "My Babe"]   Indeed, only a few months after Rosetta Tharpe's UK performances, Gerry and the Pacemakers, one of the biggest bands of the new Merseybeat sound, who'd had three number one records that year in the UK, were recording their own version of "My Babe". Gerry and the Pacemakers were, in most respects, as far as you could imagine from gospel music, and yet the connection is there, closer than you'd think.   Rosetta Tharpe died in 1973, and never really got the recognition she deserved. She was only inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame last year. But if you've ever liked rock guitar, you've got her to thank. Shout, Sister, Shout!   Patreon As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?

Scott Vaughn is an intuitive healer, who specializes in helping others see through old belief systems that no longer serve them and empowering them to take charge of their own lives through recognition of their spiritual gifts. Scott shares a supernatural event from his family history — the story of his great, great grandfather Parks, a preacher who floated to the ceiling of his church and stayed there. MENTIONED ON THE SHOW DUNE by Frank Herbert Bene Gesserit LITANY AGAINST FEAR I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. Bene Gesserit "Litany Against Fear" from Frank Herbert's Dune Book Series © 1965 and 1984 Frank Herbert Published by Putnam Pub Group ISBN: 0399128964 GUEST LINKS - SCOTT VAUGHN www.scottdouglasvaughn.com www.scottvaughnphotography.com The Grandpa Story Scott's original post about the levitating preacher HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Scott: I'm Scott Vaughn. You got that part right, I know that. I'm a professional intuitive in Johnson City, Tennessee. I do a lot of work, a lot of readings. When I first began my work, I was doing a lot of healing work. I'm sort of a, was a reiki practitioner who sort of woke up one day, and, not that all reiki practitioners need to wake up, that isn't what I'm trying to imply. I was going along about my married life and, this stuff has always been in the background for me. I was always, probably a little bit more claircognizant I would say, if I was putting a term on it, than I could have recognized at the time. I always seemed to know some things that I was not supposed to know and it seemed to make people more uncomfortable, now that I think about it, than I was able to access at the time. But somewhere around 2012, I think it's in the summer that I actually met you on the street side in Chattanooga, I ended up having a health issue and turns out I had had some elevated liver enzymes. I went to the doctor about it. That this is a theme. I've had elevated liver enzymes for a long time. So I went to the doctor and she said, We're gonna send you and get you an ultrasound of this liver. So they did an ultrasound of my liver. She said, We didn't find anything. I'm going to send you to a gastroenterologist. And of course, I was a really great hypochondriac in those days so that just absolutely fed those wonderful impulses and urges that I had going on at the time. So she sent me to a gastroenterologist and he said, We're going to do a CAT Scan of your liver. This was around, I think, maybe Memorial Day of 2012. That's 6 years ago now. Hard to believe. But they call me back, the nurse, she says, Hello, we have found something on your liver and we're definitely going to need to take a look at it. We're going to have to schedule you in for an MRI. And as you know, medical tests always... you don't get them the next day. It was like, 5 weeks out. So of course I was scared shitless. What I had to do at that point, I was working a fairly rigorous spiritual program, and I had to really put myself back into that, because I had, not really thrown that out. I just wasn't as rigorous in my practice as I had wanted to be. And as I began to do that, I don't know what happened. I began to wake up, and went to the local metaphysical shop, which was not really a place that I hung out, to be honest with you, at that point, and had a chakra alignment. I don't exactly know what happened there but I began to... He put some sto... This is how I would have described it then. He put these rocks on me and he left the room. And then I started seeing all these dead people. So that's how I talked about it then, so that's how I'll talk about it now. I started hearing, I mostly hear things, rather than see things, although I do see things in my mind's eye as well, but my mind's ear is, I think, more developed. I began to hear these conversations with people who had passed and favorite aunts were coming by, my grandfather was coming by, my father was, had not passed yet but he came by later. We can talk about that later. And after that, just began to start having what I call.. just sort of mind-blowing awarenesses. Began realizing that I needed to follow a slightly different path for my life, and I'd been working, and did until fairly recently, in higher education, in academic advising and higher education administration. I was at the point in my life where I was really ready to go very heavy into that conference-going world and writing articles and all that stuff that people do in the academic world. It sort of just really called all that into question for me and... This is not what I'm supposed to do. I'm supposed to do something else. So... took a few classes here and there. I enrolled in a ministerial program that was being offered out of our local metaphysical shop that's named Atlantis here in Johnson City, and the teacher, my teacher, who was offering it, just... I happened to be in there one day, probably buying a stone because I was getting an interest in crystals and things like that. And she said, Hey, I'm teaching this class. I don't know if you might be interested in it. And for some reason, which was very seemingly out of character for me, I said, Yeah, I'm interested in doing this! It was the Alliance of Divine Love, it's a metaphysical, ordinational ('ordinational' is not a word), but it's a metaphysical sect, it's not really a sect either, but it's a metaphysical type of ordination, with 3-years long course, and that was a really good experience for me. And the only reason that I really want to mention that is if you had, if she had come to me a year before, maybe 2 years before: I never would have encountered her. That's one thing. I would've just been like, No! Hell no! Like, You're crazy. I don't want anything to do with... No! It wasn't that I had anything against it from a religious standpoint. It's just that I thought, I thought people who are like who I've turned out to be were absolutely crazy. Funny the way things shift over time for you, and... So, went through that, and it became very apparent that I needed to... It was just time for me to start working with people and I kept hearing this strong message: You need to work with others. And I'm like, Wow, I don't know, I'm like, Why? I'd taken a reiki class several years before and that was a lot of fun. I did it, and work on, you know, put my hands on some people, did it for myself. Thought it was a real neat experience. That summer I also felt the need to take that second level of reiki and... so I opened up the following year. Just started seeing folks in my house, in my living room, as a matter of fact. I put up a massage table in my living room and started working with folks. One of my very first clients was a guy named Dennis (if you're listening Dennis, Hey!) turned out to be a very dear friend over time. I performed at his wedding last summer to his partner. I was working with Dennis and I was doing all the stuff. And in those days, it was a very formal preparing the space and making sure everything was very quiet and very sacred and taking it with just the utmost seriousness. I had these agate wind chimes that were really pretty, but when the air conditioning would blow, it would sound, clink clink clink. It was annoying. I resist the word cacophonous because that's really pretentious, but they're... I had to call it out and say it was pretentious, but it was cacophonous. It was annoying. And I remember saying, just looking up, Can't you do something about these horrible wind chimes? I can't focus on Dennis. And I got a very, very clear message back, and I still laugh about it. You don't need to worry about the wind chimes because you're not doing any of this anyway. Slade: Ooo... Scott: And I was like, Shit. But that was a very strong message for me, very early in beginning to do my work. And then, and just logically followed, I knew that I was also supposed to do readings as well but didn't know how that would work. But I knew that was coming for me. I remember one of the, the very first psychic fair I participated in, I didn't know what to call myself. I was more in the room with the healer folks, but towards the end, I was like, I'm really here to do readings. I ended up doing a couple of readings for folks and it seemed to... I don't remember them very well, which I usually consider that a pretty good sign that something decent happened, if I'm staying out of the equation and not screwing it up with my conscious mind, and everything sort of logically followed after that. I felt like I just needed to probably stop seeing people outside of my office or outside of my house, because I live in a condo and it was just... went and had to keep it clean all the time and I didn't like to do that, so decided it was probably a good idea to open up an office that was right over the hill from where I was living at the time, and began to do readings, mostly I used to be doing healing type work and it wasn't exactly reiki that I ultimately began to do that I am doing now. I don't exactly know what I would call the methodology that I have but it's not a lot of hands on. It's a lot of chanting, it's a lot of frequency, and just sending energy back and forth for folks. It's a lot of Spirit Guides. It's a lot of calling in the Medicine People from other cultures, and allowing them to hold the space and allowing that work to continue. But began doing readings. Primarily my work now consists mostly of doing readings instead of doing healing work. That's sort of not the focus as much now. It's just turned out more that I'm doing readings. And, I was told very early on that, the people that I would end up working with were probably going to be people who were not necessarily always sold on the new age path, the whole metaphysical thing. That the person I was going to be working with, you know, anyone who seeks me out, I feel like I work with whomever I'm supposed to work with, but the majority of the people who come my way are folks who are disappointed in organized religion and in the church and things like that. But they haven't been able to find a way to replace that with anything that's meaningful. These are folks who are sad sometimes and disillusioned about the way they've seen spiritual matters handled. And folks who really want to... They know there's something more but they may have been taught all their lives it was not okay to seek those things. Because that was not allowed. There's a strong threat of that, especially here in this culture in east Tennessee. So that tends to be a lot of the people who come my way. One of the things that I feel very strongly that I'm supposed to do is sort of, the Hermit card in the tarot is one that I sort of embody. Just sort of holding the light up for folks. Slade: Mmm... Scott: You know? Standing there, along the path. The nice thing about that card is, you don't know what's in front, you don't know what's behind. But there he is, holding the light. And that's sort of what I've been feeling lately, that I'm supposed to embody. Is holding the light up for people and interpreting the things that are given to me to offer to them as insights for them along their path. Slade: You're a Lantern Bearer, Scott! Scott: A Lantern Bearer - that's cute. I love that. Slade: I actually have an episode about the Hermit tarot and how I re-named it the Lantern Bearer, because... yeah.. Scott: You know what? I may have stolen that. That may be where I've heard that. I may be stealing from you and I don't - Slade: I stole it from someone else. Scott: Okay. Slade: There was a, I don't know if there's one of those decks floating around out there where the Hermit card is actually called the Lantern Bearer, or someone somewhere has used that term, and I was like, Ooo, I like that! Scott: I'm sure Hay House has put it out somewhere, you know? Slade: Right. Yes. Copyright whoever said it! But I do have an episode about it and the episode's mine. I want to talk to the audience for just a second and let them know that, for those of you listening to this conversation, Scott is a friend of mine and he's an honorary member of the Automatic Intuition community because he was sort of teaching himself while being friends with me, but yet I still needed him to be a part of that group. I've wanted to interview him since day one of this podcast but here's the thing with interviewing your friends. We could talk for hours about anything, and it may or may not necessarily be fun or interesting to anyone listening. So far I think you're doing pretty good, but... So the challenge was to find the right focus topic, and with so many of the guests on the show being intuitives and healers and peers, Scott and I were kind of brainstorm texting about this for months, like, What should we do an episode about?? And then I see this post on Scott's Facebook wall titled, "Concerning The Time My Great-Great Grandfather Floated to the Ceiling of the Church—And Lingered.” I read the story and I lost my mind over it. I told Scott “THIS” this is what I want to talk to you about. Nobody else has this story. This was months ago. Scott: Great! Slade: Go ahead and say something while I clear my throat. Scott: One of the things about the story is that, a lot of times I'll re-run myself on Facebook. You know. Nobody really notices that much about that as the person doing it. People think, Oh this is great, you just put it together now. No, this is a re-run from last year. You liked it then too. But I think the first time I put that out there, maybe 2009, I was in a much different head, I was in a much different heart space than I am now, okay? So there was a lot of, the original version of that, if it's still out there and I don't think I went back and edited it, really conveys a lot of the skepticism I had at the time with it. And then the latest version comes from what I would say is a more heart-centred, really knowing, just from a much more knowing place and much more loving place and a much more... I'm very open to the possibilities of everything that could have happened when he floated to the ceiling of the church and lingered. Slade: Okay, so... let's just... You've got to tell us this story. Your great-great-grandfather floated to the ceiling of the church. I'm just going to let you tell us... Like I've never heard it before. Tell it to me. Scott: Okay. Like you've never heard it before. Because a lot of times when I'm talking about this story, I'm talking about the story itself, which is different than telling the story. It's the story about the story. It goes that my great-great-grandfather had started out, I think, in the hills of Tennessee and then south eastern Kentucky of a town Jellico, Tennessee. That's about two hours above, maybe an hour and a half, an hour above Knoxville, if you take Interstate 70. A very remote mountain area. If you were writing a book about Appalachia and you really wanted to find something that seemed almost cliche it was so realistic, you could find that. And so, in the back woods, probably a Baptist minister, okay, and my understanding at the time is that he was a very straight up and down Baptist minister, very read-the-scripture, the talk-a-lot kind of guy and was making a pretty good living as preacher back in the woods. Around the early 20th century, this wave of Pentacostalism started sweeping through the country, hitting about, in the mountains (my electricity just went out as we're talking about this - Hello, great grandpa, great great grandpa Parks). So (electricity's back) so this wave of Pentacostalism starts sweeping through the country, probably hits the area in the early 20th century in Jellico, and... So he began to preach... I don't know how familiar you are with some parts of the Bible. Over in the book of Corinthians, it talks about the spiritual gifts of healing, of prophecy of times, of people being able to interpret speaking in other tongues and people being able to put their hands on other people and they be healed from things. He began to preach those things and a lot of people followed him as he started a new congregation. He took his congretation with him and they moved and started something else. The people who went with him were all into it, but a lot of people in the community, it was heresy to them. So, the story goes that three men, allegedly from the Baptist church, came in to break up the service. They had guns and they appeared in the very back. My great-great-grandfather, I'm going to start calling him Grandpa Parks, or grandpa. Grandpa Parks was up there preaching and he saw the men and he said, If you come one step closer, I pray the devil smite you. And they walked closer. And of course, people in the church were starting to really panic and get nervous. My great-great-grandmother, Grandma Parks is sitting there thinking, she starts to pray, and at that moment, the Spirit of God picks him up from the pulpit and he rises to the ceiling of the church, and of course, Grandma Parks is there and she's like, Oh God, he's about to be 'transa-lated', was the word I heard. He's about to be transa-lated, just like Enoch. He's about to be transa-lated just like Enoch. She thought he's gonna... People are like, He's gonna go through the ceiling! He's gonna go through the ceiling! And, of course, you know, he's just as surprised as anyone, right? So the look on his face... really, you know, he's described as looking like he was scared, because, not because of the men at the back at this point, because he really just didn't know what was happening. And moved him through the congregation, through the middle of the congregation. You know, there's the rows on either side, right through the middle of the church and put him down right in front of the three men with the guns. Thus, after that, he was left alone. Now the story also goes that the three men, one of them, shortly after went blind. One of them dropped his gun, took his place in the church service and shut up. Okay? He joined up. And the other one, at some time later, you know, who knows, history tends to conflate times, he killed himself. Yeah, so, sort of like the three men on the cross maybe, or the Holy Trinity there, I don't know. But there were three of them. Outside of that, this entire denomination in the mountains, they call themselves The Church of God of the Mountain Assembly in Jellico. They're still there! There are still... You can look them up on Google. The Church of God of the Mountain Assembly headquarter in Jellico. That's one of the things that they talk about in some of their literature, was the time when Brother Parks was lifted to the ceiling of the Church, and that was a sign that they were doing the right thing. They were on the right track and that their message had weight and that began to grow and spread. There are quite a few, interestingly enough, Jellico's in the coal mining area and as the mines dried up, people went north. So a lot of my family, as well, went to Michigan. I have quite a bit of family in Michigan, or had been in Michigan at the time. So there's quite a bit of that church now in Michigan as well, which is interesting. And so, the amazing part of that story for me in that whole thing is it's sort of like a litmus test to my own spiritual development for me, when I look back. I was told the story as a kid. I was always fascinated by family stories. I know this is not the focus of what we're talking about, but I have equally interesting stories from... Nobody levitated, but people getting, sticking knives up their nose and dying from that, the other side of my family. I'll talk about that later. It's my uncle, Hugh Ballard, on my dad's side, who stuck the knife up his nose and died. But, I was always fascinated somehow, I sort of became like R2D2 for my family. They implanted stories within me as a small child and it tended to speak to me in the wrong way and I just start projecting holographs of stories that make people uncomfortable, I suppose. I don't know. Slade: I'm kind of that person in my family as well. Scott: You're a storyteller, so... Slade: Well, I think that... It's weird because I had aunts that would do genealogical research and stuff like that. And they would always give the stuff to me. Like, they didn't give it to their own kids. For some reason, people identified that I was the one to give it to. They felt like it would get told somehow, or it would be preserved, or just cared about, in a way, by me, that other people wouldn't. And it's true! I do care about all that stuff more. But I do wonder, what would possess you to think this, like, 7 year old boy wants to know about all this stuff? Scott: I've often wondered that, but it came to me from my mom's side of the family and my dad's side of the family. I've ended up with all of the family pictures. I've ended up with all of those things. But my ancestors, 'ancestors' is using that term broadly, my family members who have passed, my ancestors, some of them were alive when I was alive, they figure very prominently in the work that I do too. So that's another matter entirely that we can talk about in a minute. Slade: Here's something I want to ask you about, because... Scott: Please do! Slade: And I have to say, all the months that we tried to think of a reason for you to come on the show, and then all the months since we decided what the reason was, interestingly, two days ago in real time, I interviewed Ian Allen, who is a friend of yours, who also lives in Johnson City, and part of our conversation was about how supernatural, mystical, what we consider new age topics were viewed through the filter of Christianity. So you have some crazy, I mean, full-blown witchcraft going on, but it was all in the name of Jesus, you know what I mean? So I was wondering what your perspective is on that sort of weird mishmash of Christianity and the supernatural stuff which is not traditionally thought of as everyday Christian. Scott: Right, you know, I've been thinking that you were going to ask that question. I've not had an answer for it all week. Because I've had that in mind as well and I think that I was raised in a very traditional Christian family environment, and those kinds of things, though it's very conservative religion, a very evangelical religion, generally speaking, the belief was, a lot of those things that happened in, you know, the early church, we didn't have access to them in the current church. So the idea that, Can people be healed? Yes they can but God uses doctors. That's why God created doctors. Whatever, right? But... I've had to look further back into my family to be able to find some of those things, and that's in my Pentecostal relatives, right? Some of my mom's family, they still follow that path, and a lot of my family doesn't. But they're always the ones at the family gatherings I'm gravitating towards, because they're talking about prayer and things that have happened as a result of prayer. They're talking about warts falling off people. They're talking about somebody who had cancer who doesn't have cancer now. Somebody who was a drug addict one day and suddenly had an experience and they've not used drugs in 25 years. Those kinds of things. All kinds of ways of having miracles. And I don't really have an answer to your question. I have just a lot of experiences, a lot of things I believe have happened but I don't really know why that is. So thank you for asking - it's a great question! Slade: Do you believe in miracles? Scott: Yeah, of course! Now, I used to - For many years, I considered myself an atheist, okay? And so I didn't believe in anything. And it took a lot of work for me to not believe in anything, which tells me I wasn't a very good atheist. The kind of work that I'm doing now certainly was off the table because it was deeply buried. And, I think, you've heard that there are no atheists on the front lines of battle. I don't know. No atheist in the foxhole? I don't know about that, but I do know that some things that happened to me in my life forced me to really reconsider there was something out there that was bigger than me, and that wasn't me. Otherwise I would really be dead or worse... So if you can think of yourself being dead or worse, the worse part means that you're probably not an atheist. Because you tend to believe there is something going on out there that doesn't line up with your belief system, being an atheist, or at least as I understood it. For many years, I've used, I was an alcoholic. I'm a recovering alcoholic now, drug addict, those things. It's been many years since... I've been clean and sober for many years. Slade: Was that the result of anything spiritual? Or was it more of... from that atheist time period? Scott: It was probably from all that. I was a very bitter guy, a lot of bitterness against, and rebellion against religion, and those kinds of things, and with the family history, I suppose, that's always a part of it. Just poured alcohol onto it and pills and just went through a period of my life where I really wasn't there for it. As I got sober, that's sort of the beginning of my re-awakening. I believe we're all born awakened, right? Then I think, our families, our society, etc., I think we just get closed up and closed up. And in the end, we buy into that belief that we're closed up so much and we just continue to add to it, and alcohol was my way of adding to it, and not being here for my life. As I began to show up more for my life, I began to see, at least for me, there's a lot more than what I'm willing to admit is out there and in here, right? There a lot more and I don't have to be shut off from it. As I began to realize that I'm not shut off from it, I started awakening. I won't say that I'm awakenED. I will say that I'm awakenING, if that makes any sense. I've been sort of thinking that some of these things might come up over the course of us talking today, and in some ways, I think I am baffled that I'm doing this and I'm grateful that I am doing this, but... If you had met me 10 years ago, and you had told me... If I had come to you for a session 10 years ago, of course I wouldn't have come to you for a session 10 years ago because I wouldn't have dared to 10 years ago, based on where I was, and you had told me that I was going to be doing this kind of work and all of that, I would have laughed. I would have thought, Boy, he has confirmed that he is just as crazy. I went in here and paid him money, you know, that kind of thing. So yeah. Slade: I probably would have told you. Scott: Yeah, I know. And I would have been like, You're crazy! Slade: I would be that person people always tell me about. I hear this all the time, 'A psychic told me once' and I'm always in the chain of... I'm never the first one to tell them, which is probably cool. Scott: Correct. Slade: I'd rather be at the end of that line of... Just to go back to this miracle for a second, with your great-great-grandfather... Scott: Absolutely. Slade: You know what, if it's okay with you, I'll post a transcript of your Facebook post so everybody can kind of read some of that detail, because it's different every time you tell it, right? There's a different perspective. Scott: It is! Which tells me it was different every time it was told to me so who knows exactly. There have also been members of my family who've worked really hard at debunking the story too. We'll talk about that in a minute if you like, but yeah... Slade: Well tell me, did you ever speak to anyone who actually witnessed this? Scott: Okay. The first family reunion, and it's interesting that all this is coming up, because in two weeks, I will be at the site of all this again. Okay? In two weeks, my family is having a reunion in Jellico. Because I'm the person who knows the stories, and knows where all the people are buried. I'm probably the last person alive, at least in this branch of my family who could take you to the graves of everyone who has come before us. Anyway, I don't know where I was going with that, but the first thing at every reunion, I take my tape player and I, because when I was a kid, my parents for my 5th birthday, my parents bought me a tape recorder, okay? So I was always just recording things and I knew that some of my older family members were going to be there, and I knew I wanted to get some things on tape. I also knew that my grandmother was toward the younger end of the family. So my grandmother, and even her mother who passed away, who died really young, she probably wasn't there for what happened either. But I was there. My grandmother's best friend, Helen Seal, who she grew up with, came down from Michigan to be part of the reunion because: She and my grandmother were like sisters and, The coal-mining camp where everybody was originated there in Tennessee and Kentucky. Everybody was very much like family so Helen came down. Helen was still part of, she's passed now, but she was part of the Church of God of the Mountain Assembly in Michigan. So she still attended the church but in Michigan. You know I said a lot of people went to Michigan to work in the automobile factories when the coal mines dried up. Slade: Right. Scott: So Helen was also just a great storyteller. She had long grey hair that she wrapped up in a bun. She was just a spitfire of a woman so I knew I wanted to talk to her about it. And I wish I could find the tape. It's going to be that mythical tape that's lost, that I can't find now. Sort of like Nixon's tape that's missing from Watergate. Yeah, but she's telling me, and it starts out, she says, 'I know you want to talk about the time Brother Parks was lifted to the ceiling church, and many years ago, I asked Sister Parks what she thought about it.' So she goes into this story, okay, and she wasn't there, but she was getting it, she was telling me her version of Sister, of my great-great-grandmother telling her the story. Okay? Slade: Okay. Scott: Then Helen's husband, Oble, he, I don't know how he knew this, because he didn't live there, but he said that there was an old lady living in the community, Granny Mobely was her name, Granny Mobely (sounds like a Lee Smith novel)... Slade: It does. Scott: It does! Granny Mobely, who was there at the time, right, and I said, Where does she live? And he said, Well I don't know. It's , I don't know, or I didn't know to just go down to the grocery store and ask people where Granny Mobely lived, but I never investigated that any further. I was into college and changing schools and all of that. So I never got any first hand account. I do know that the church has some official records and there have been two books that they have put out, two little books, where they tell the story. Also, he kept a journal as well that one of his other descendants has. I was thinking, How many descendants must he have? My great-great-grandparents had like, 8 children. And so, if you think about probably... There are probably thousands of people now who are descended from them, living today. But one of my cousins' distant relatives, probably what I would call a 5th cousin, in Michigan, who's the pastor of one of the churches there, oddly enough, has his journal, where he wrote some things down. I've never been able to get ahold of that. I've wanted it. I've sent requests. I've asked for copies of it. I've tried to communicate with people about it and that's never been... No one's ever been able... No one's ever been willing to communicate with me about that, which just adds to the mystery and tells me that one day I will see it. You know how that goes. He used to prophesize well too, about great birds with people in them flying through the air. That one day, people would be, one day, this is Oble Seal told me this, that one day he was out preaching, he said, One day, there'll be people on the moon. And this was in the 30s, right? And I don't know what we were talking about in the 30s. I don't know about... I mean, I'm sure there were, certainly there were aircrafts in the 30s. I don't know how many he would have had access to, but there certainly had not been astronauts in the 30s yet. Slade: We had Jules Verne and we had, I don't remember if that... What was it that Hans Fritz movie, Metropolis, or... There's some really, really old creepy black-and-white movie I think that might portray people travelling on rockets to the moon, right? Scott: Yeah, so maybe that's... I don't... Who knows if he had access to seeing those... Slade: Umhmm... Oh yeah! Scott: You know, probably not. So I don't know. And I wish that I could find that tape. I know it was in the attic where I used to live, and then I've moved since then. I don't know where that box of tapes went. You know how that kind of thing goes. Slade: It's a great set up for a novel. Scott: Yeah, I know. It is! Slade: Someone finds the box of tapes in the attic and then, you know. Of course, in the story, you're both your 40-year old self and your 95-year old self so we can switch back and forth between time periods. I can see the whole thing right now. Scott: Absolutely. Yeah, that's very good. Thank you very much! That's good inspiration for that. Slade: Yes! Scott: Reverend Parks also is part of my work that I do here today too. He's one of what I call my 'assistants' and my 'guides'. Slade: So he's like an ancestor guide? Scott: He's an ancestor guide and when I'm working with someone specifically in a healing type session, he very strongly appears. Slade: Interesting! Scott: A lot of really tuned-in people say, Who is the bearded man here who is not you? Slade: Ooo! Scott: That's Grandpa. Pay him no mind. He's very much who I call in to help when, you know, need a space cleaned out, he's very helpful with those kinds of things. He's very good at removing what I call, reptilian type energies from folks as well. Slade: You know, I have to say, it just occurred to me as I was asking you that question about the whole connection with Christianity versus this kind of supernatural stuff, one of the things that became really apparent to me, because I always thought of myself as very much sort of against fundamentalism, still do... Scott: Same here. Slade: Very anti-Christian, all that kind of stuff. But one of the things that I have observed, kind of begrudgingly in the beginning, was that the people who are more open to talking about mysticism are by nature people of faith. And so, if you go to an older generation of people and you want to talk about supernatural stuff, there's a lot more little old church ladies that want to talk about spirits and healing and communication from the dead and all that kind of stuff, and are a lot more open to it than, certainly than an atheist is going to be, or an intellectual from our generation is going to shut that down much more quickly too. And so I learned very quickly to kind of have this universal translator running in my mind and to realize that that was the language they were given to speak with, you know, was the language of the Bible in the culture that they grew up in and so, that's what they had to work with. But some of the things that they will tell you and some of the things that they will describe are just straight up like, Well this is total paranormal investigation! Scott: This is straight up like off Sylvia Browne. Slade: Totally, totally! Scott: Yeah. Slade: So it's made me a little bit more open-minded in myself. I have had to be more open-minded about the fact that when you strip away the vocabulary and you strip away whatever theology's comfortable and whatever symbolism is used, in both camps, or in any camp and all the camps, you'll find that there are people who are extremely plugged in and sensitive and aware and awakening and all that kind of stuff. And then you will find people who are going through the motions and claiming to get it when they don't and then you have people who are just completely tuned out. But that idea of who that someone is who is plugged in transcends everything else. And so when I recognize another person who's 'plugged-in', I don't care. All that other stuff is transparent. You see through it. And so I had these experiences where I have talked to these little old ladies who use the Jesus vocabulary through the whole thing, but meanwhile, they're the most likely to get what it is that I do and to be accepting of it. Scott: I had an aunt who was, she always used to like to renounce the spirit of fear. That was one of her big things that she liked to do. Slade: Ooo I like that. Scott: Renounce the spirit of fear, you know. Here, 25 years later, I start into A Course in Miracles and talking about love and fear and all of those things, and I'm like, Good grief Rita, you were onto it all along. Slade: It reminds me of the Bene Gesserit Litany against fear from doom. Do you know it? Scott: No, I don't. Slade: Okay. I'll put it in the show notes. Fear is the mind killer. Anyway. It's a little litany that the nun-like witch organization in that world.. It's a chant that they do when facing fear. It's a way of, kind of like... Scott: Fair enough. Slade: ...allowing the fear to pass over and through you. I can't recite it off the top of my head right now but I'll put it in the show notes for your sake if no one else's. Scott: For my ADD's sake, I'm trying to sit here not get on my phone and look it up while we're talking. Slade: I know! Don't do that in the middle of an interview! Scott: Yeah, I'm not. I'm definitely not doing that. I'm thinking, he'd never know. This is audio, but you'd know, because you're you! Slade: The litany against fear. It's really good. It's up there with the Serendipity prayer, and, you know, it's one of those tools for me. It's a mantra for sure. So I gotta ask you this. Scott: Please. Slade: Given your perspective and where you are in everything, I see you as someone who is kind of an archivist in a way, of all this old knowledge and old wisdom. You've got pieces of it, more so than others might. And so, as you think about how you are breaking that all down, sort of processing it and then putting it back together and give it new life and new form, what do you most hope to contribute to the conversation about spirituality? Scott: You know, it's to really... There's so many trappings that folks put on it. And just let go. That's one thing that I'm always telling folks. Just let go and stop trying to control absolutely everything. Just allow. Seek the truth for yourself and allow it to come. You can study whatever you want to study, but be open to the sources that the truth might come to you. Be open to what speak to you. Be open to what doesn't speak to you. Sometimes what doesn't speak to you speaks to you more than... because it doesn't speak to you, if that makes sense. In the 12-steps circles, people talk about 'let go and let God', you know, let go and let Spirit do Spirit's work, and realizing that a lot of that happens in a very subtle way in that it often times doesn't happen very instantly. It's a process and also that just because we're spiritual, just because we studied the Law of Attraction, which is great, you know, it's fine. It's not the only law there is though. Just because we've read this and watched the latest YouTube video, just because we've done this or this or this, it doesn't absolve us from doing the work on ourselves. And from taking, you know, sometimes I tell the folks that I'm working with, if nothing else, I'm gonna be able to, hopefully, with some assistance here, provide you at least some kind of mirror so that you can see yourself honestly, and see your path in a way that you've not seen it before. At least as honest as I can convey it to you, as honest as you're able to see it, but to look very closely inside for the answers and not externally. Because the answers for me are not the answers for you, and there's certainly some universal truths, but the path for everybody is slightly different. And each person has his or her own expression. And I just feel like I'm babbling, Slade. I love that question. Slade: It's meant to be a stumper but it's also meant to be a prompt to... Well, I used to ask people what really bugs the shit out of them in all this crap. And then I realized, Heather O'Shea I think was the person who was like, 'I'm going to reframe that, make it more positive'. And I was like, 'Okay, that's a good idea'. And so, going forward, I try to re-frame that as a more positive thing. Scott: One thing I would say is, this is not a cake mix. Okay? This is not... You realize there are certain... We don't have as much control over things in our world as we do over baking a cake. It's a good analogy, but again, it's not the best analogy. Okay? I do believe that the new thought community talks about planting seeds and watering seeds and all that, but the idea is that you've got to plant the appropriate seeds for the thing that you want. Right? And... Slade: And you have to do it. You have to tend it. Scott: YOU have to tend your garden. Remember, from Candide, and he goes through all that and Candide at the end: All of this is well and good. All of this is well and good. I've encountered the woman who had her ass eaten because of steak or something, but I still had to cultivate my own garden. You know? I still had to cultivate my own garden. And Pangloss is saying, 'All is well and good in this best of all possible worlds.' And Candide's saying, 'Yes, thank you, but I still have to cultivate my own garden', and that is me planting the appropriate seeds and doing the literal work of putting the thing together. Keep seeing things. If you can think it, you can be it. If you can dream it, you can be it. On one level, that's certainly true. You know? I know that there's a lot of hope for people in that as well. But if it were that simple, we wouldn't have any problems. If it were that simple... I hear a lot of talk about... Everything's all the Law of Attraction this, and the Law of Attraction that, and that is certainly all well and good and there's so much truth there, right? But it's not simply just thinking happy thoughts all the time and everything will be okay. It's about embodying a new way to be, and truly, not just sprouting affirmations (hehe, 'sprouting'), not just spouting affirmations at yourself. Sprouting - I'm using that seed metaphor. Slade: Right. Taking it all the way through Scott: Yeah, taking it all the way through. Thank you! It's... You can't just say, 'I am at peace with myself' and 'today's going to be better' and everything just work out. You have to go a little bit deeper than that. You have to do what affirmations really do. You have to... The nice thing that I love, because I deal with a lot of affirmations with folks that I work with is to say, 'Use this as an affirmation.' And 'You'll know it's working if, after you've done this for a couple of days, you feel worse.' Because that means it's lodged itself in those deep recesses of the things that you don't want to have to deal with and it's bringing it all to the surface. It's going in there and it's sort of destroying the energy of the thing you no longer want, and it's just all bubbling up like stomach acid, right? In that way, you know you're on the right track. Slade: Interesting... Scott: There's always that thing is, I want to feel better and I want to feel better NOW. And I'm always like, we can all feel better, but we still have to do something. You know? We still have to take a look at our ourselves. Slade: Well, you know, and you don't just do it once either. I think the... If I was answering your question with the way that you're answering it, I would say that, the thing that really kicks you in the gut when you realize that you have to get up and re-do it every day. You have to start over and over and over again and every day. I mean, some things might carry you through longer arcs of time, but really, it's not A decision. It's thousands of decisions. It's thousands of times making the same decision over and over again. Scott: It's a whole spiritual practice. It's not just a set of isolated things. It's a whole spiritual practice, you know? Like yoga is a spiritual practice. It's a whole thing. It's not just going to a class now and then. Although I love going to yoga classes, but it's a whole spiritual practice that I have to embody. And I have to figure out a new way to BE, not just a new way to think, not just a new way to act, but a whole new way to BE if I want some results in that way. But certainly I know inside of me, given, left to my own devices, I'll always usually pick the easy way out. Slade: Scott, it's so good to capture one or maybe a handful of your stories. I know that we still have so many others that we could do, but I'm glad that we finally got one in the can. I really want to appreciate you for coming on and telling your story. Tell everyone where they can go find you online. Scott: Yeah! It's sort of the entrepreneur phase of my life right now but ScottDouglasVaughn.com is the website for my spiritual work. Also I'm a photographer! I take pictures of abandoned buildings and things like that. And all of this grew out of that same summer, summer of 2012 that I was talking about a little bit earlier. That's ScottVaughnphotography.com My website, ScottDouglasVaughn.com is pretty good insight into what I'm doing right now.

This is a conversation about divorce, God and sexuality. To access the show notes, please visit:  http://wp.me/p4MtzN-93

Calvin Grant - Pentacostalism vs Pharasiam - Part 1 by Truth Church of Calgary

This week Brandon and Charles join Pastor Josh in a discussion about Pentacostalism and what it means, how they worship, and is it biblical?

The co-authors of the Modern Marburg blog discuss their journeys into Lutheranism.

Description of Pentacostilism

Pentacostalism is a movement within Christianity which today has hundreds of millions of followers around the globe. But what is lessor known is that the modern day Pentacostal movement traces its origins back to a street in the Little Tokyo section of Downtown Los Angeles. 

In part 1 of 2 Tina Richerson on growing up a lesbian Mormon, resolving this with her family, her important same-sex relationships, trying out Pentacostalism and becoming a professional musician.   Link to Part 2 here Part 1:Read more →