Levon Helm, Davidson's Frank Price; Three Stories in Southern Religion. An Excerpt

       From the 19th century to the present, Southern musicians and those inspired by southern forms of music drew from biblical apocalyptic imagery, angry prophesy, gentle reasurrances, and archetypical character struggles. The potent combination of the biblically poetic,  set within a literalist scriptural undersatanding and juxtaposed to a violent and inequitable social and economic system, collectively created the tensions that empowered the most memorably explosive music of American popular culture.

   Southern visual and oral vernacular artists inspired musical renderings of biblical texts, which took their meanings far outside the confines of the readings sanctioned by the southern denominations. The tensions contained within the culture, expressed through music, helped to vault southern performers such as Cash and Rosetta Tharpe to stardom and created characters songs memorably voiced by creative artists such as Levon Helm. And sometimes, as in the case of Cash, those tensions and ambitions drove addictions that could destroy lives. At the same time the music also provided one means of the coming southern cultural and political revolution.

   The list of southern performers with religious backgrounds or connections who fed the globalization of southern sounds could go on......The sounds of the South became a part of the soundtrack of the globe in ways few could have imagined in an earlier era, whn the region seemed to be a hopeless backwater. With regards to cultural production, no place could be seen as more important. In the twentieth century Southerners shaped the soundtrack of the Globe.