A little bit country, rock-n-roll, jazz, blues, christian, folk, celtic....

Fon Mor-the only band I was a groupie for-this is on my birthday at Fiddler's Hearth

I think my first exposure to Christian music was a Debbie Boone album from about 1981.  Not that my parents ever told me I couldn’t listen to secular music (I had been a country music fan, and then rock music fan before that) a spiritual experience led me to the belief that secular music would pull me down and was just dead wrong.  So began my journey with Christian music that turned me on to our church’s radio station, which was the "upbeat" Christian music station that featured groups like Petra, The Imperials, Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, and countless others.

Having purchased tickets to a Petra concert in 1985, a small group from my Christian high school planned to make a night of it in South Bend, until the school administration caught wind.  Since Petra was a bit anti-Baptist (they had a song entitle "Color Code" which busted on Bob Jones University), we were threatened with expulsion if we attended.  The next few weeks' chapel sessions were a liturgy of the ills of Christian rock music.  I had a hard time with that since many of my Baptist friends listened to secular rock music, but somehow Christian rock was worse?  Shortly after I began to listen to secular rock as the music video scene was just dawning, and I would stay up late on Friday nights to watch Friday Night Videos-remember that?  After awhile, I felt convicted and returned to Christian rock, only to backslide again as I entered college.

When I graduated from high school I was still pretty conservative when it came to secular versus Christian music.  But with my new car that actually had an FM radio in it (the truck I drove only had AM), soon a world of other stations was opened to me so I would channel surf on my commutes.  Soon secular music-rock and pop-found a way into my personal culture shift.

But it wasn’t just rock music.  I began to develop an appreciation for a variety of genre's that included instrumental New Age music, some Blues, Classical, Jazz, and Celtic.  I had a few discs of New Age music my dad had, which I found incredibly soothing to do homework when pulling near-all-nighters.  And the Celtic music, which my friend Fabian introduced me to, made me feel a connection to my roots.  I started back into country music by the mid 90s and never left it.  I slipped so far away from Christian music that I didn’t begin listening to it again until I met my future wife.  I thought Christian music tanked so badly during the late 1980s and through the 1990s, it really seemed pointless.  I didn’t become a fan again until Third Day and Newsboys rose to the top of the music scene.  Now some pretty solid talent has joined the Christian music pool.

 

The only music I can't muster the strength to appreciate is opera....well, and show tunes.  I don't think as a dude I'm alone here.  But if there is one type of music that I appreciate most...it is anything played on bagpipes.  So we make a yearly pilgrimage to the Fulton County Trail of Courage just to listen to the bagpipes.