The History of Rock
November 3, 2025 § Leave a comment
I love rock and roll. I’ve been in three rock bands and few things thrill me more than the guitar crescendo in the Grateful Dead’s Viola Lee Blues, Hendrix playing All Along the Watchtower, or the Cream’s Crossroads or Spoonful. So I’m breaking out of my Quaker mold here to share a resource that you other rock fans might really appreciate:
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, a podcast by Andrew Hickey. I cannot praise this podcast enough.
First of all, it’s exhaustive. The latest episode is the 181st.
Second, it’s utterly comprehensive. Hickey’s knowledge is truly encyclopedic.
Third, it’s not just a history of one genre, or even just a music history. Because so many streams of American popular music influenced rock, he covers many, many other genres. And it starts in the 1920s; that’s how far back he tracks these influences. He doesn’t even get to the 1950s until the late teens episodes.
And he is always giving lessons in music theory, defining rhythms and beats and chord progressions and arrangement choices and vocal styles and the evolution of instrumentation. And he tracks new musical genres as they emerge and evolve and merge.
And he tracks the history of the industry, of record companies and producers, and of promoting platforms and performance arrangements, and record charts.
And he tracks technology, recording technologies, record production technologies, performance technologies, like the effects of acrylic records with the 45 and LPs on, not just the demise of 78s but on the industry more broadly, or the evolution of the electric guitar and the introduction of the drum trap.
He has an excellent ear. He is constantly telling you how artist A’s song X sounds like artist B’s song Y. And he comments on, not only why the song he’s highlighting is important in the history, but why it appealed to audiences, and what’s distinctive or even revolutionary about it, what it contributed to the music’s evolution.
And it’s a social history, most important and fascinating. How segregation affected the music. How black musicians and song writers were treated—and mostly cheated—by record companies and performance halls and radio stations. How the music shifted from an adult entertainment to one focused on teenagers, especially white teenagers. How the black music scenes in different American cities fueled different kinds of music. Almost every episode includes discussion of these kinds of social contexts.
At the same time he repeatedly and humbly discloses his own possible shortcomings in reporting these matters. And he reminds us how hard it is to know what really happened, even while he’s giving you the most amazing detail about really complex stories, especially when it involves who wrote what or who was in what band when. The history itself is very slippery and sometimes opaque, but always fascinating, at least to me.
He is British, and has a rather thick accent, but he speaks very deliberately and slowly, so I have no trouble understanding him.
So if you’re interested in how doo wop evolved, or what’s the difference between rhythm and blues and R&B, or between country music and country and western, and how that mattered in the emergence of rock, or which of the dozens of candidates might be the first rock and roll song, or how Earth Angel set the pattern for doo wop going forward, or how Fats Domino crossed over, whose second language of English was so bad (his first language was French creole), so that some people found him impossible to interview, or the importance of Big Momma Thornton and Big Bill Broonzy, or Jimmy Page’s evolution as a musician, or what swing contributed to the genre, or . . . You get the idea.
Really great stuff.
Meetings and Ministry, Part 1 : Introduction
July 28, 2025 § Leave a comment
I’m starting a new series of posts that looks at how our meetings recognize gifts in ministry, how we help emerging ministers discern their calling, and how we support their ministries.
I’ve been away from this blog more or less for quite a while, but I think I’m back. I have been paying attention to publishing my poetry and more recently, I’ve been working on a couple of submissions to Pendle Hill. One of these is on the meeting’s role in supporting vocal ministry. At the same time, while thinking and praying and writing in a deep and sustained way about vocal ministry for many months, my own ministries are in an exciting and exercising period of engagement and transition.
In the middle of all this, I became aware of the Friends Incubator for Public Ministry, which I mentioned in my last post, and I participated in the development of “The Public Friends Recording Process,” which the Incubator’s convener Windy Cooler shepherded
Back in 1992, I had been part of a three-person team that updated New York Yearly Meeting’s process for recording gifts in ministry and soon after that, I served on the first clearness committee convened under the new guidelines to consider the recording of a Friend’s gifts. We did recommend recording to the Yearly Meeting and they approved it. So I have been carrying a concern for the recognition, discernment, and support of gifts in ministry for a long time.
All this focus and activity around our meetings and their support of our ministers and their ministries has reactivated my own call to a ministry focused on fostering greater attention in our meetings on these concerns. It has produced new openings that I want to share with you my readers and raised questions that I hope my readers will be led to answer, here in this blog, but also in your own meetings.
Much of this exploration will be personal, as many of these issues are front and center for me and my meeting right now. But some of it will be about our tradition, our faith and practice, our history and our experience.
In the next post, I want to start with the story of my own first call to ministry and how it has led to this moment.
Sarah Ruden on the Apostle Paul
March 13, 2025 § 2 Comments
Dear Friends
I’ve started another of Sarah Ruden’s books: Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own time. It promises to be exceedingly good. As a classics scholar, she reads Paul against the backdrop of contemporary (to him) Greco-Roman literature and culture. I’m sharing a couple of examples from early in the book.
Here’s the first couple of paragraphs from chapter 1: Paul and Aristophanes—No, Really, an another from a paragraph a few pages later :
The last thing I expected my Greek and Latin to be of any use for was a better understanding of Paul. The very idea, had anyone proposed it, would have annoyed me. I am a Christian, but like many, I kept Paul in a pen out back with the louder and more sexist Old Testament prophets. Jesus was my teacher; Paul was an embarrassment.
But one day, in a Bible study class I was taking, a young woman objected to the stricture against sorcery in the “fruit of the Spirit” passage in Paul’s letter to the Galatians. She said that to her sorcery meant “just the ability to project my power and essence.” Most of the class gave the familiar sigh: Paul was kind of a brute, wasn’t he? I would have sighed too, had there not flashed into my mind an example of what sorcery could mean in a Greco-Roman context: the Roman poet Horace’s image of a small boy buried up to his neck and left to starve to death while staring at food, so that his liver and bone marrow, which must now be imbued with his frenzied longing, could serve as a love charm. Paul, I reflected, may never have read this poem (which depicts a crime that may never have happened), but it shows the kind of reputation sorcery had in the Roman Emipire—certainly among people with a polytheistic background, who made up the main readership for his letters both during his lifetime and after it. I could not get away from the thought that what his writings would have meant for them is probably as close as we can come to their basic original importance, as key documents (prior even to the gospels) inspiring the world-changing new movement, Christianity.
Then later:
What Greco-Roman works can teach about Paul’s writings is incredibly rich and virtually unexplored so far—and often rather mortifying to a previous knee-jerk anti-Paulist like me. For example, there is the matter of the komos and the right to have a really good party. The “fruit of the Spirit” passage in Galatians does not forbid “carousing,” the outrageous New Revised Standard Version translation of the word, or “revellings,” as in the King James. A komos was a late-night, very drunken, sometimes violent postparty parad—which could even end in kidnapping and rape. We have livid scenes of it in Greek comedy and other genres. It was nearly the worst of Greek nightlife, and if any Christian young men counted on still being allowed to behave like the rampaging frat boys or overgrown trick-or-treaters in a foul mood, their elders would have been relieved to have it in writing from Paul that this was banned. Other translations, probably in an effort to be less dour, have “orgies,” but that is unsatisfactory: some features of Greek parties were orgy-like, but not the komos. And since orgies are quite rare today (I think), a reader might wonder why Paul included something so unusual in his list, as if a modern pastor were to speak against flashing. We would never guess from the English that the abuse Paul is speaking of is both serious and customary.
Deepening Techniques, Part 1d: Relaxation with Focus—Counting Down
August 17, 2024 § Leave a comment
Note on the series
I have created a page aggregates the posts in which I describe various techniques for centering down or deepening, shared from my own practice and experience. Here’s the link:
Deepening Techniques for Friends
When the series is finished, I will publish a pdf file for downloading on that page with all of the posts in one document.
Counting Down
I combine the deep breathing and the focused relaxation on parts of the body with two countdowns. Counting down is its own deepening exercise, one often used in hypnosis, and also in some yoga teachings. I learned it from Silva Mind Control. There’s something about the process of counting down.
Moreover, when combined with other techniques, you condition your brain to associate the countdown with the results of the more effective techniques, until the countdown itself helps bring the deepening by its conditioned association, even if you don’t combine it with other techniques.
The exercise is a combination of visualizing the number and saying it to yourself at the same time.
Counting Down: 3–2–1
With the first countdown, I visualize and say to myself the number three three times, then two two times, then one once. With each repetition of the number, I do one of the relaxations:
- 3 : forehead and eyes
- 3 : mouth and throat
- 3 : shoulders and chest
- 2 : stomach
- 2 : lower abdomen and inner thighs
- 1 : legs and feet
So now we’re doing three things at once: breathing once, counting once, relaxing an area—all at once. Takes a little practice, and it may be too much for some practitioners; it may feel overly busy and therefore distracting. Everyone finds their own way.
Counting Down: 7–6–5–4–3–2–1
After the first countdown, I do another, starting with seven
On seven, I project my awareness out into the environment around me, especially to whoever might be in the house with me.
With six, I do the same thing I did with the 3–2–1, but this time, focusing:
- with six on the face,
- with five on the mouth and throat,
- with four on the shoulders and chest,
- with three on the stomach,
- with two on the lower abdomen and inner thighs, and
- with one on the legs and feet.
In our time of trial
May 16, 2024 § Leave a comment
This has nothing to do with Quakerism, but I am so taken with it that I want to share it with somebody.
I’ve been reading William Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” an (extremely) long poetic autobiography, so excellent in its self-exploration and commentary on so many things. This is from Book Seventh: Residence in London, in which the young Wordsworth comes to the big city from his idyllic home in the Lake Country not far from the geographic fountainhead of Quakerism, and after finishing college at Cambridge.
My title: In our time of trial (pun intended)
Pass we from entertainments, that are such
Professedly, to others titled higher,
Yet, in the estimate of youth at least,
More near akin to those than names imply,—
I mean the brawls of lawyers in their courts
Before the ermined judge, or that great state
Where senators, tongue-favoured men, perform,
Admired and envied. Oh! the beating heart
When one among the prime of these rose up,—
One, of whose name from childhood, we had heard
Familiarly, a household term, like those,
The Bedfords, Glosters, Salsburys, of old,
Whom the fifth Harry talks of. Silence I hush!
This is no trifler, no short-flighted wit,
No stammerer of a minute, painfully
Delivered. No! the Orator hath yoked
The Hours, like young Aurora, to his ear:
Thrice welcome Presence! how can patience e’er
Grow weary of attending on a track
That kindles with such glory! All are charmed,
Astonished; like a hero in romance,
He winds away his never-ending horn;
Words follow words, sense seems to follow sense:
What memory and what logic! till the strain
Transcendent, superhuman as it seemed,
Grows tedious even in a young man’s ear.
Restorative Justice
October 21, 2023 § 2 Comments
Marina, the life partner of another friend of ours, Claudio, was killed in a bicycle accident a few days ago. She was hit from behind by a young person who was distracted while driving—not sure exactly how at this point.
This circle of friends, who live all over the place, meet every few months by Zoom, and we met night before last. Claudio spoke for a long time about their relationship, what he knows about the accident, his emotional state, the days following; he was visiting family in Italy when the accident occurred.
He said several times that he was not “spiritual,” it was Marina who was spiritual. But every word out of his mouth, every meditation of his heart, was deeply, deeply spiritual. Especially, for me, what he had to say about the driver, who is being charged with something very serious—involuntary homicide? I don’t quite remember, except that it was homicide of some kind.
Claudio didn’t know whether he would have an opportunity to address the judge in the case, but he know what he wanted to say.
The person (a man, he thinks) should spend as much time in jail as Marina lived on life support between when she was admitted and when her organs were harvested, a few days. Then he should not be in jail. He should have to address young people ten times a year for I don’t remember how long about the folly, danger, and wrongness of driving while distracted. And for some time, the duration of which I also don’t remember, twice a week, he should volunteer at an animal shelter to walk dogs; Marina was a dog walker for part of her income.
This, I thought, was such a great example of restorative justice, which tries to be transformative rather than punitive.
He also spoke about forgiveness, which he says he’s working on, with some success. It was a beautiful and horrible time we had together.
The Road to Continental Heart
July 14, 2023 § 2 Comments
Dear readers:
I have published three books of poetry and a fourth is about to come out. You can learn more about them on my personal website, stevendavison.com.
The book. The first book is actually a hybrid book of poems, photographs, personal letters, short essays, and other elements. The poems in The Road to Continental Heart: Befriending, and Defending, the Spirit of North America were written for a friend who walked across the country with a group of environmental activists, one poem a week for nine months, most of the poems incorporating research I had done into the landscapes and places through which he would walk in the coming week.
A review. A review of Continental Heart has just come out on The Book Review Directory website, which, I’m glad to say, is quite positive.
More about the book. Continental Heart is a coffee table style book, hardcover, 8 ½ x 11, 320 pages, using fine paper stock to do right by the dozens of photographs that my friend and a friend of his took along the way. Whatever one thinks of the poems, everyone agrees that the book is beautifully designed. Kudos to my publisher, Boyle & Dalton.
The economics. Unfortunately, the book is quite expensive, at $49.99. I think it’s honestly priced, even underpriced, for its size and quality, but it’s still a lot of money. A window into the corrupt economics of the book publishing industry: at this price and given the standard book store discount of 40%, neither I nor my publisher make any money on bookstore sales. The reason is that my publisher and I agreed that charging enough to make any real money, say, $59.99, would make it too unattractive for a book of poetry; $49.99 is stretching it already. But Amazon gets a discount from the printer as well as from the publisher, so from Amazon we make a little money.
The other books. My second book, Dancing Mockingbird, is a collection of nature poems, with sections for mountains, animals, bodies of water, etc. The next book, Dancing with the Moon, is a full-length collection of love poems. I just signed off on the final proof and expect its release perhaps in August. This book has what I consider my best work. I will shamelessly promote it when it comes out.
On poetry. I suspect that more people write poetry and even publish poetry than read poetry. I only know of three people in my circle of friends besides myself who actively read poetry. Meanwhile, there are zillions of poetry journals, book publishers, and contests. These organizations stay alive, I believe, through the fees they charge for submitting your work, not through book and magazine sales. Fees range from $3 to $15 for submitting (usually) three to five poems, and $15 to $30 for submitting books and entering contests. It costs real money to get published today as a poet. I’m sure it’s the same for fiction writers. But still we do it. We are driven—or, as a Friend, I would say led, though, to be honest, it really does feel like a drive. It is immensely satisfying to get published, though, I have to say.
Thanks for indulging me in this post, off Quaker topic as it is.
Great Resource: Academia.edu
January 1, 2023 § 2 Comments
I subscribe to a service called Academia that makes available papers on a huge range of subjects. I have a search filter for papers about Quakerism and I get papers all the time, many of which I download to read.
Unfortunately, I don’t remember how I set that filter and I couldn’t figure it out on the site when I decided to share this resource (not sure why it took me so long to do this, either). It may be that I simply performed a search to start with, and now its algorithm knows what I want.
Anyway, it has finally come to me to share this site. If you’re interested in recent work in academic Quakerism, this is a terrific resource.
Silent, Expectant, Waiting Worship
November 8, 2022 § 1 Comment
We worship in silent, expectant waiting.
Silence
Why the silence?
To make room for the voice of the Spirit. We remove all the business that other churches fill their services with—hymns, Bible readings, set ritualized speech and behavior, prepared messages—
- so as not to crowd out or shout over what is usually such a still and small voice within us;
- so as to give us time to clear our own minds and hearts enough to have ears that hear;
- so as not to guide the movement of the Spirit within us and among us with outside direction, but to give it the full freedom it needs and deserves;
- and because outward forms, least of all ones that are both habitual and rote, rarely usher in the inward grace that is holy communion.
Expectancy
What do we expect? “Expect” is a strong word, stronger in a way than faith or hope. Perhaps, faith and hope are more apt.
Is it not presumptuous to expect something of the Spirit? We expect something to happen when the laws of nature are involved, when we trust the one who has promised it, or when experience shows us its likelihood. We expect the sun to rise in the morning. But trust is faith. And what is our experience?
For some of us some of the time (most of us most of the time?), our meetings for worship seem a bit bereft of Spirit. We have faith that the Spirit is working within us and among us as we worship. We hope that we sense this movement and heed its message, its direction. But do we expect it?
Or are we like Jacob, willing to wrestle with the Spirit until it gives up its blessing?
Perhaps we expect something of each other. Perhaps we expect Friends to come to meeting for worship prepared, minds and hearts turned already toward the Light and seasoned in its grace from regular and vital personal devotional life. Perhaps we expect Friends to exercise faithful discernment, bringing with them spiritual buckets ready for lowering into the well of Living Water from which they will pour out Spirit-led vocal ministry.
“Expectant” waiting may rather be aspirational. And perhaps questioning the integrity of our expectancy in the context of worship will foster the faith, the hope, and the experience of its fulfillment.
Waiting
What are we waiting for?
We are waiting to know the Eternal Presence. We are waiting for continuing revelation, for the love and the healing and forgiveness and strength and guidance and renewal and creativity that is always seeking its way into our hearts and out of our hearts. We are waiting for the true prompting of the Holy Spirit to minister to our fellow worshippers, that still small voice heard and brought forth in faithfulness.
But this “waiting” is not a passive stance in which we fill an interval of time with whatever until the spiritual bus arrives. It is an active attention, like that of a waiter in a fine restaurant, whose eyes are always on his tables and who is poised ready to serve when a glass needs filling with Living Water, or when the food is ready to serve to the diners at the eschatological banquet, not bread alone but every word that flows from the mouth of God.
Waiting can be even more engaged than such active attention. Waiting can be the wrestling with the angel of the Lord, a mighty struggle to pass through our obstacles and faults and regrets, our wounds, so that we may sink down into the Seed in our depths.
If we listen in the silence with open minds and hearts, if we give our full attention to the movement of the Spirit, if we give ourselves to the inward struggle in the Light, if we come with a bucket ready to lower into the depths, then we can, in fact, expect some revelation of Divine Love. At least that’s my experience.
Acts, the Judicial Vow, and Early Friends
July 1, 2022 § 3 Comments
Listening to Ketanji Brown Jackson recite her judicial vow as a Supreme Court Associate Justice, one phrase jumped out to me. Here’s the generic text of the vow:
“I, _________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as _________ under the Constitution and laws of the United States.
This is very close to the passage that early Friends used as a foundation for what we now call the testimony of equality. Back then, it inspired their practice of plain speech and non-practice of hat honor, in which they addressed all people, regardless of their social station whether above or below themselves, as equals, and refused to doff their hats to show subservient respect to those of higher station than themselves. Here’s the passage in Acts (10:34–35; KJV):
Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.”
I can’t help but wonder whether the writers of the judicial oath did not directly borrow from this passage in their wording. The oath was established in the Judiciary Act of 1789, and so the King James would almost certainly have been the version read by the writers. I would love to know whether any Quakers were involved in the writing of the Judiciary Act or this vow. Or perhaps this language was quite widely known and used also by non-Quakers in this kind of context.
Through the Flaming Sword 