Many acts – from Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis to Marvin Gaye, Prince, Madonna and U2 – have struggled to reconcile the sacred with the profane in their art. But not everyone felt the need to make as decisive a split between music and religion as Steve Arrington did in 1991. A percussionist with a background in soul and jazz, the American musician joined funk group Slave in 1978. He became their lead singer, with hits like Just a Touch of Love and Watching You turning him into a big enough star that in 1984 he could call his first post-Slave solo group Steve Arrington’s Hall of Fame without it seeming a hollow boast. Four albums followed before Arrington quit music to become a Baptist pastor.
“Spirituality is something I’ve always known,” he says. “I grew up in the church, I have preachers in my family. I’d also always loved music since I can remember. These were the two loves of my life. My spirituality just became more front and centre.”
For most of the next 20 years, Arrington devoted his life to the church. He was still making music: it just wasn’t secular. He says the decision to get out wasn’t prompted by a need to remove himself from the ungodly world of stardom, but instead reflected some of the shifts he’d already made during his musical career. “I didn’t get in to music to be a star,” he says. “I was in a salsa band, then I joined Slave, then I did Hall of Fame. Each time, my music changed – I haven’t been afraid to follow my heart. I wanted to devote more time to the search to get closer to God. It just felt honest.”
If the musicians-turned-pastors (the likes of Arrington, Little Richard or Al Green) are the most head-turning examples of artists trying to accommodate their faith, there are others for whom the process is less dramatic. For Sheila E, Prince’s percussionist from 1984 to 89, the religion she’d grown up with came to the forefront in 1992, when exhaustion put her in hospital and she felt near breakdown. Reconnecting with religion helped her to recharge. It was also pivotal in giving her the strength to confront the sexual abuse she’d suffered in childhood.
In the 1980s, with Prince’s band and solo, Sheila E’s outfits and stage persona emphasised her sexuality. It’s not something she felt under pressure to do, nor is it something she necessarily wants to defend. “Especially when we’re younger, we go through this trying to be sexy,” she says. “I wasn’t doing it for attention – at least, I didn’t think I was. And I wasn’t doing it to sell more records. I did it because it felt good, and I wanted to feel sexy. But then you go, ‘Well, let’s look at our morals here.’ Or, ‘I’m married now and I have kids.’ Some of us change, some of us don’t. We spend so much time fixing things, but we don’t try to fix ourselves. I buy insurance for my refrigerator in case it breaks. But we don’t buy insurance for our soul. Insurance is letting God do what he does.”
As she relates in The Beat of My Own Drum, her new autobiography, the drummer born Sheila Escovedo often found herself in places where spiritual values seemed in short supply. Life on the road, mainly as part of predominantly male bands, brought her as many uninvited sexual advances as it did opportunities to overdo drugs and drink. She credits her upbringing for helping her to navigate the pitfalls: “It’s like saying, ‘This room is full of fire, but I’m gonna walk right through and not get burned.’ You kinda have to go, ‘I’m not gonna conform to what’s happening in the room - I’m gonna change the atmosphere.’ I have the ability to do that, to be the light. You can be a Christian while you’re popular and successful, still have a great time, and still get things done and reach people.”
For other artists, spirituality can be not just a comfort, but an expression of politics. That was apparent with U2’s muscular Christianity in the 1980s, and with Chuck D’s support for the Nation of Islam during Public Enemy’s rise to global prominence in the late 1980s. “I had to remember there was a team of us and everybody had different beliefs,” he says. “Being the head of the group, I had to blend everybody’s beliefs into one. That was easy with my background: my parents taught me how to be independently seeking of whatever god I had to find.”
Hip-hop artists of the late 1980s weren’t known for their religious devotion. Since the first rap records, the genre had celebrated conspicuous consumption, while sexism and misogyny had become synonymous with much of the music. Rappers talking about God were outnumbered heavily by those keen to rhyme about sex, drugs and crime. Even within Public Enemy itself, Chuck had to balance the politically divisive views of the group’s Professor Griff (who was suspended from the band after being quoted making anti-Semitic remarks in the Washington Post) and vocalist Flavor Flav, who had the first of his stints in drug rehab after spending three months in prison for shooting at a neighbour. How did he manage to keep them united behind a single message?
“You’ve got to listen,” he says. “And then come up with how you’re gonna make it all work – like a pencil-sharpener brings everything to a point.” To Chuck, religion and art are indivisible. “What helped me personally is understanding that art is God-talk,” he says. “Any time I’ve felt that I was kinda lost, I always reached down within and expressed myself. That’s helped me understand that everything is beyond us. We can add to our experiences while we’re here – while we’re seen, versus being unseen. I know that sounds like a whole big whipped-up thing, but to me religion is within. I’m a citizen of no country. I’m an earthizen: a citizen of no government. And I’m a culturalist, which means I don’t choose a religion. Culture is my religion, art is God-talk, and. I keep it at that.”
For Arrington, religion proved to be part, but not all of, his life. Towards the end of the 2000s, his balance shifted back: he stopped working as a pastor and began making records again. He featured on 1 Question, a collaboration with Californian musician Dam Funk and rapper Snoop Dogg, which grew out of the popularity certain Slave and Hall of Fame tracks had acquired as sampled source material for rap producers. An LP out next week, Way Out 80-84, finds him revisiting unfinished work from the early 80s and refashioning it anew.
Has he, after that time in the church, reached a new conclusion about how to balance music and religion? “Well, it’s not a conclusion, just as the music I was doing before wasn’t a conclusion. I wanted to bring in so much of the energy that I was feeling, primarily in the area of just who I’d become, and to understand that now I could marry my music, even the music that I had done before, into my headspace of what God has done for me. It ended up being very simple, man. Just love somebody, if they’ll let you. And that’s it.”
Musician to minister: three more singers who got religion
Al Green
The king of southern soul altered his life dramatically after a tragedy in October 1974, when his girlfriend Mary Woodson White killed herself after pouring boiling grits over him. In 1976, he was ordained as a pastor at the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis, and gave up soul singing in 1979, after falling off a stage in Cincinatti. He returned to secular music with the 1995 album Your Heart’s in Good Hands.
Little Richard
Touring Australia in 1957, Little Richard – the wildest, most lascivious of the original rock’n’rollers, described by Mojo as a “bisexual alien” – saw a flaming fireball cross the sky. He took it as a sign from God to repent, leave secular music, and enter the ministry (in fact, it was the Russian space probe Sputnik 1). He returned to the US to study theology. In 1958, he formed the Little Richard Evangelistic Team, but returned to rock’n’roll in 1962. That lasted another 15 years, before he returned to evangelism. He finally reconciled secular and spritual in the 80s, deciding rock’n’roll could be used for good or evil.
Wayne Cochran
The “White Knight of Soul” was one of the liveliest performers of the 1960s: a cape-clad soulman with a giant blond pompadour, performing frenetic versions of R&B and soul hits. But a combination of excess and taking too little care of his voice meant that, by the 1970s, his singing was a shadow of what it had been. He joined the ministry in 1981, founding the Voice for Jesus Ministries in Miami, but the soul still lives on in him – there’s a remarkable clip from 2001 of Cochran performing in church, a portly, elderly man, still bringing out the occasional James Brown shuffle. Michael Hann
