Roundtable on Leah Payne, <i>God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music</i> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024)

In the volatile year 1968, just weeks after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, an editor in the Roanoke World-News noted a strange new pop cultural phenomenon. Christian folk and rock music had arrived. Jonathan Guest, an Anglican pastor from Liverpool, and Chuck Hess, a Roanoke, Virginia man, had begun to perform for teen groups and college students. “We are reaching young people in their idiom with their type of music,” Chuck exclaimed. Put simply, Chuck believed that “if Christianity is to be relevant, it must be relevant today, and we think we can make it so with new forms of music and lyrics.” ( World-News , June 29, 1968) Others who joined the early God rock craze included the shambling amateur pop rock group the Crusaders, the psychedelic rockers Mind Garage, and the young rockabilly gospel shouter Isabel Baker. From these inauspicious beginnings, Christian pop music would develop into a billion-dollar industry by the 1990s.