Upon This Rock

The first Contemporary Christian Music album I ever bought was by a group called 2nd Chapter of Acts. They were a sister/brother vocal trio - Annie, Matthew and Nellie - who had just begun to appear on the scene. Their first album - which I played and played until I nearly wore it out - was simply titled *With Footnotes, and yes, the asterisk was important. About three quarters of the back cover of the album is filled with the entire second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, and the *footnotes section is directly underneath, where the tracks and credits are listed. A neat touch. The front of the album, which is predominantly green and yellow in its themes, show the three siblings grinning into the camera, and yes, they are unmistakably brother and sisters. *With Footnotes was released on the Myrrh label in 1974 and contained 11 tracks, all but one of which were written by Annie Herring . The producer of the album was Annie's husband Buck, and their master stroke was to enlist...

I've spent a lot of time in the studio over the last week or so, recording programmes for my new show which will air this Autumn on CrossRhythms radio  (see dates below!) The show is called Just Vinyl, and it features classic Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) tracks, drawn largely from the 1970s and 1980s. I'm playing exclusively vinyl because it has a particular quality and although there are a few clicks and pops every now and then, I think this just adds to the beauty of the medium. Many of the artists I'm featuring are giants of the genre, pioneers of CCM when it was in its infancy, when very few of the musicians were full-time. Today, Christian music is big business - there are radio stations, record labels and management/touring companies dedicated fully to promoting it. Back in the day, very little of this existed, and those who were involved in pioneering CCM had to forge their own pathways. It was not easy to finance ventures into Christian music - most musi...