Can't Nobody Do Me Like Jesus!: Photographs from the Sacred Steel Community

By Robert L. Stone and Eric Lewis Williams

Folklorist Robert L. Stone presents a rare collection of high-quality documentary photos of the sacred steel guitar musical tradition and the community that supports it. The introductory text and extended photo captions in Can’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus! Photographs from the Sacred Steel Community offer the reader an intimate view of this unique tradition of passionately played music that is beloved among fans of American roots music and admired by folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and other scholars.

In 1992, a friend in Hollywood, Florida, introduced Stone to African American musicians who played the electric steel guitar in the African American Holiness-Pentecostal churches House of God and Church of the Living God. With the passion, skill, and unique voice they brought to the instruments, these musicians profoundly impressed Stone. He produced an album for the Florida Folklife Program, which Arhoolie Records licensed and released worldwide. It created a roots music sensation.

In 1996, Stone began to document the tradition beyond Florida. He took the photos in this book from 1992 to 2008 in Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Mississippi, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida, and at concerts in Italy. The images capture musicians as they play for worship services before spirit-filled believers singing, dancing, shouting, praying, and testifying. Stone gives the viewer much to witness, always presenting his passionate subjects with dignity. His sensitive portrayal of this community attests to the ongoing importance of musical traditions in African American life and worship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Dec 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781496831514

Robert L. Stone

Robert L. Stone is an independent folklorist and photographer based in Gainesville, Florida. He has been documenting the steel guitar tradition of African American Holiness-Pentecostal churches since 1992. Supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Stone produced an album for the Florida Folklife Program released by Arhoolie Records as CD 450 Sacred Steel in 1997. Stone, continuing his work with Arhoolie, has produced eight more CDs and directed the Sacred Steel documentary video. In 2011, the Florida Department of State honored him with the Florida Folk Heritage Award.

Book preview

CAN’T NOBODY DO ME LIKE JESUS!

CAN’T NOBODY DO ME LIKE JESUS!

 Photographs from the Sacred Steel Community 

Robert L. Stone Foreword by Eric Lewis Williams

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

This book was made possible by a grant from the Arhoolie

Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit organization dedicated to the documentation, preservation, and celebration of regional roots music and its makers. Learn more at arhoolie.org.

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Copyright © 2020 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Printed in China

First printing 2020

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Hardback ISBN 978-1-4968-3150-7

Epub single ISBN 978-1-4968-3151-4

Epub institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-3152-1

PDF asingle ISBN 978-1-4968-3153-8

PDF institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-3154-5

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

In loving memory of Willie and Jeannette Eason

CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHURCH MEETINGS

WAKES, FUNERALS, AND TRIBUTES

CELEBRATING GOD’S GLORY THROUGH STYLE AND ADORNMENT

PORTRAITS

THE SACRED STEEL CONVENTIONS

FESTIVALS AND CONCERTS

HOUSE OF GOD CENTENNIAL

GENERATIONS

Extended Photo Captions

Notes

FOREWORD

No More the Devil’s Instrument

Creativity and Innovation in Black Pentecostal Music Culture

—Eric Lewis Williams

Since the publication of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), in which he unveils the chaotic beauty of his formative African American Pentecostal tradition and exposes its highly percussive spirituality to the world, the writings of the African American novelist and essayist James Baldwin have held a treasured standing in both American literature and cultural studies. Named by one of his critics as America’s inside eye on the Black Holiness-Pentecostal churches,¹ Baldwin’s writings would expose the world to the very inner-life of this tradition by unveiling the moral, cultural, and theological worlds inhabited by those who dwelled within her gates, and through depicting the ways in which this religious experience was actively performed by those who believed. Baldwin’s writings would expose a wider, largely secular, audience to black Pentecostal beliefs and practices including the tarrying prayer tradition, the tradition of shouting or holy dancing, and the moral imperatives of the holiness codes, which served as guides for the faithful in their quests to live in the world, but not of the world. By consciously highlighting these particular practices, Baldwin emphasized both the highly dynamic and performative nature of black Pentecostal spirituality, thus providing his readers with a window into how Pentecostalism was envisioned within the African American religious imagination.

In his 1963 publication, The Fire Next Time, Baldwin writes of his own religious experience within the tradition. Though having been disengaged from the tradition for some time, he continues to extol the beauty, significance, and the indelible imprint left upon him by the tradition when he writes:

there is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicolored, worn, somehow triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord. I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, would fill a church, causing the church … to rock. Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, … the Word when the church and I were one. Their pain and joy were mine, and mine was theirs—they surrendered their pain and joy to me. I surrendered mine to them—and their cries of Amen! and Hallelujah and Yes, Lord! and Praise His name! and Preach it, brother! sustained and whipped on my solos until we all became equal, wringing wet, singing and dancing, in anguish and rejoicing, at the foot of the altar.²

But like so many who would come under the influence of the Pentecostal movement both before and after him, for Baldwin, it was in the power of the music and in the dynamism of his community’s worship life that the beauty of holiness was most clearly revealed.

Writing on two of the three trajectories within the Pentecostal tradition that trace their origins to the Church of the Living God, the Pillar and the Ground of the Truth, founded in 1903 by Mary Magdalena Tate, it is this same power and beauty that is attested to in Can’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus! Drawing upon nearly three decades of fieldwork, photography, and fellowship within both the House of God (Keith Dominion) and the Church of the Living God (Jewell Dominion), folklorist Robert L. Stone provides an arresting photographic witness to the power of Pentecost as experienced in both traditions. By furnishing the readership with visual exposure to the embodied religious practices of the communities spotlighted, this volume gifts the readers with an up-close and personal view of Pentecostalism’s highly distinctive music culture, as well as the intensity of the community’s fellowship during seasons of joy, sorrow, and celebration.

Commonly known as musical innovators within the broader constellation of African American churches, Pentecostal musicians have long been noted for their experimentation with and employment of new musical forms and modalities. While these innovations would include chord progressions, harmonizing structures, tempo variations, vocal arrangements, ad-libbing, and reviving traditions of call-and-response singing, these experimental innovations would also be inclusive of alternative forms of musical instrumentation and techniques. Utilizing drums, tambourines, organs, synthesizers, saxophones, and trumpets, the Pentecostals saw their adoption of these instruments (and sounds) as the sanctification of the very instruments used in the production and performance of the devil’s music. Perhaps no other instrument better symbolizes both the sanctification of the devil’s instruments and Pentecostal musical innovation than the electric guitar.

Since the earliest days of the Pentecostal movement among African Americans, the stringed instruments have been commonly employed in the service of making a joyful noise unto the Lord. Widely used by Pentecostal preachers, pastors, and street evangelists, the guitar would become popularized within most black denominations and the Pentecostal churches through guitar-playing virtuosos from within the tradition, like Elder Utah Smith, Reverend F. W. McGee, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But not only would Pentecostal guitarists influence musical genres within the church, the testimonies of secular guitarists like Elvis Presley, B.B. King, and Jimi Hendrix are also telling, as each were careful to credit their black Pentecostal tutors for the inspiration behind the creative engagements of their instruments.³ In Can’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus!, by focusing on the steel guitar tradition in both the House of God and the Church of the Living God denominations, Stone demonstrates how contemporary Pentecostal guitarists continue to expand upon these earlier traditions of creativity and innovation.

In addition to documenting the use of the steel guitar in worship, Stone’s photography also captures the manner in which the faithful use their very lives and bodies as instruments, consecrated and repurposed for the service of the Living God. The visual feast contained within this volume provides ample opportunity for