Honky Tonkin & Gospel:

I know my transgressions, my sin is ever before me.

(Psalm 51:3)

Last night Linda and I watched Ken Burns’ History of Country Music. It was the third episode mainly about Hank Williams. At the tail end of one of his Honky Tonkin tours singing songs like…

When you are sad and lonely and have no place to go

Call me up, sweet baby, and bring along some dough

And we’ll go honky tonkin’…

Williams lies drunk in the back seat of his touring car when his mother says, “We’re coming home, I can see the light.” He woke from his drunken stupor and wrote:

I wandered so aimless life filled with sin

I wouldn’t let my dear savior in

Then Jesus came like a stranger in the night

Praise the Lord I saw the light.

Honky Tonkin on Saturday night and making it to church on Sunday morning seems the way of Country Music. I’ve always suspected something superficial and unduly sentimental about Country Music’s way of following Jesus. Like many, the light he saw, didn’t seem to change much. Nevertheless, there was always Sunday morning. Maybe we make Sunday morning church so distant from Saturday night that folks like Hank Williams would never dream of coming to church. I’m not so sure we would know what to do with somebody staggering in the church’s front door recovering from a Saturday night bender.

There’s something else… After the singing of I Saw the Light, we hear a contemporary singer/songwriter, who marvels over the song, comment: “When an artist gets it right for himself, it’s right for everyone.”

It caused me to think of the many Psalm telling, like country mucic, a Saturday night story. Psalms, like:

-I know my transgressions, my sin is ever before me. (Ps 51-David’s adultery)

            -I am weary with my crying, my throat is parched.

               -I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.

               -Deliver me from deep waters. (Ps 69)

 And these Psalms were sung by the congregation—the song book of God’s gathered people. Somehow, the whole congregation gets it. And, so we sing about my sin and my crying and my deep waters. “When an artist gets it right for himself, it’s right for everyone”. Such Psalms, and there are many, may be closer to Hank Williams than Charles Wesley.