Contemporary Christian Music

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Mark Joseph

In the late 1990s a genre of music, unknown to most of America, began push its way onto the popular American music scene. Contemporary Christian Music or CCM traced its roots to Southern Gospel and Gospel music, but only began to be noticed by a larger audience when the music industry changed the way it tracked record sales in the mid-1990s.

In the late 1960s, Capitol Records hassled a blond hippie named Larry Norman for wanting to call his record We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus and a Lot Less Rock and Roll. In response, Norman decided to make and distribute his own records. Norman's records shocked the religious and irreligious alike. He mixed his strict adherence to orthodox Christianity with honest cultural observations in songs like "Why Don't You Look into Jesus," which included the lines "Gonorrhea on Valentines Day, You're still looking for the perfect lay, you think rock and roll will set you free but honey you'll be dead before you're 33."

Before long Norman's dreams of artistic freedom had become a nightmare when executives took over and created CCM the genre which, unlike the artists who dreamed of singing songs about Jesus for non-Christians, quickly focused on marketing the records to true believers. CCM had become a large industry, signing and promoting artists who were encouraged to make strictly religious records that were heavy on theology but lacking in real world relevance. CCM also began to cater to best-selling "secular" artists who experienced Christian conversions, helping them to craft religious records which both alienated longtime fans and couldn't be distributed through ordinary music channels. Among these were once popular performers like Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad, Dan Peek of America, B.J. Thomas, Richie Furay of Poco and Buffalo Springfield, Al Green, Dion, Joe English of Wings, Rick Cua of the Outlaws, and many others.

By the 1980s, other studios became receptive to Christian music, and allowed artists more flexibility with song lyrics. In 1983 a heavy metal band named Stryper comprised of born again Christians emerged from the L.A. metal scene and signed a record deal with a "secular" label Enigma which had produced many of the early metal artists. In 1985 Amy Grant signed her own direct deal with A&M that got her a top 40 single "Find A Way," and led to two number one singles "The Next Time I Fall," in 1987 and "Baby, Baby," in 1991. Leslie Phillips dropped out of CCM in 1987, changed her name to Sam, and signed with Virgin, a company with whom she recorded several critically lauded albums. Michael W. Smith signed with Geffen in 1990 and produced a number six hit "Place In This World."

With the commercial success of Grant and others, many CCM artists no longer wanted to be identified as such, preferring to be known simply as artists. In their view, being identified by their spiritual and religious beliefs limited the music industry's willingness to widely disseminate their music and alienated some consumers. Many of these artists left their CCM labels and signed with "secular" record labels or arranged for their records to be distributed in both the "Christian" and "secular" music markets. By the mid-1990s artists like dc Talk, Jars of Clay, Bob Carlisle, Kirk Franklin, Fleming and John, Julie Miller, BeBe and CeCe Winans, punk band MxPx, Jon Gibson, and others once mainstays of CCM, had signed with "secular" labels.

Christian artists' attractiveness to "secular" record labels increased with the introduction of a new mode of calculating record sales. The introduction of SoundScan, a new tracking system, brought attention to CCM in the mid-1990s. SoundScan replaced historically unreliable telephone reports from record store employees with electronic point-of-purchase sales tracking. SoundScan also began to tabulate sales in Christian bookstores. The result suddenly gave CCM increased visibility in popular culture as many artists who had heretofore been unknown outside the Christian community began to find themselves with hit records.

Jars of Clay, a rookie band which formed at college in Greenville, Illinois, was among the first of these success stories. Signed with a tiny CCM label called Essential Records, their debut record was selling briskly in the Christian world when one single, "Flood" came to the attention of radio programmers who liked it, and unaware that it was a song from a "Christian" band, began to give it significant airplay in several different formats. Before long "Flood" was a smash hit played in heavy rotation on VH-1 and numerous other music video outlets. Mainstream label Zomba, which had recently purchased Jars' label, re-released the record into the mainstream market and the Jars Boys--as they were affectionately known--began to tour with artists like Sting, Jewel, and the Cowboy Junkies. Their second release "Much Afraid," benefitted from the SoundScan arrangement by debuting at number eight on the Billboard Album chart.