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Johnny Cash sang gospel. So did Elvis Presley. And Run of Run-DMC and Al Green are both full-fledged reverends now.
It's not hard to extricate religion from music. It's impossible. The very roots of modern music tie back to gospel, hillbilly music and the blues, all of which dealt with the soul in one way or another.
Think of the potent mystique of the Crossroads for the blues player - would you trade your soul for the blues?
Robert Johnson was convinced of it - so convinced of it, in fact, that he not only wrote "Crossroad Blues," about the fabled spot where in the dark of night the devil taps you on the shoulder and takes your soul as he tunes your guitar, but other songs like "Hellhound on my Trail." And Skip James had "Devil Got my Woman," while Willie Mabon threatened black magic in "I Don't Know" by sprinkling goober dust around the bed so that the "papa" of the story would find himself dead by the beginning of the morning.
Not so far removed from the obsession with evil found in the dark music of today, eh? And the hillbilly music, as the string music of the Appalachians and Ozarks was once called, was rife with its own superstition - conjurers, murder ballads and the evils of men. But in the end, as the Carter Family sang, there was "no depression" in Heaven.
Out of this vein also arose folk, and with that came Woody Guthrie with his own brand of Jesus, a figure for the poor and downtrodden. This same image is the mystique of Christianity that propels Cash - along with the promise of ultimate justice.
Cash sang "The Man in Black," about dressing in black for injustice. But in this, he takes on a Christ-like pose, akin to Guthrie's Jesus, the wandering everyman who just so happens to be the Son of God.
Both the pre-country string music and gospel found the ultimate reward in Heaven. But in the case of gospel, it also was descended from the same root that propelled blues, only taking the path of righteousness over the despair of darkness.
It was the same evil injustice contained in the lyrics of both captors and slaveholders. And both were rooted in chant like work songs that promised a better time - if it wasn't tomorrow, it was the great reward at the end.
But then these three fused to make rock 'n' roll as it first arose. Presley was just a good ol' boy and for all his excess still tried to maintain a semblance of a soul - but often ended up crying in the chapel instead.
The 1960s expanded rock's spiritual awareness. As Eastern influence spread into music, so too did Eastern philosophy and spirituality, as The Beatles showed us, questing toward some cosmic consciousness. Two years after "Let It Be," George Harrison had "My Sweet Lord," celebrating Krishna as much as Christ, as if all was ultimately the same. This is not to mention whatever the hell Jim Morrison was talking about, or any of the bands of that era for that matter.
But even in this, the devil was never far away. British youth took the blues and added the distortion of Blue Cheer, Jimi Hendrix and others and forged the foundations of heavy metal - with Led Zeppelin the step between it and hard rock and Black Sabbath as the first official metal band.
Led Zeppelin had its occult dabblings with Jimmy Page, a devout scholar of Aleister Crowley, the famous occultist. But the band's vision was more Valhalla than anything we know, all mythology alongside "Stairway to Heaven."
But Black Sabbath, with its fusion of post-war Birmingham dread and supernatural fear like Denis Wheatley and Nathaniel Hawthorne, forged music that sounded evil but wanted to battle it at the same time.
The first album, with its cover displaying an out of focus witch in the midst of a garden, had "Black Sabbath," a song about Satan persecuting a dabbler of the macabre as he cries out to God and "N.I.B." (Nativity in Black) in which Satan tries to court a human woman.
But songs like "After Forever," off of Black Sabbath's third album, "Master of Reality," was the first pronouncement of faith - the band threw aside critics with an oddly pro-Christian song, especially for a band who's named after an Italian horror movie.
Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath weren't without evil precedence - the skuzzy Rolling Stones had written "Sympathy for the Devil" and had albums called "Goat Head Stew" and "Their Satanic Majesties Request" - but it was the imagery over the reality, reminding us that evil is very real without claiming evil.
All of it would culminate into the imagery that all forms of metal so embraced - except Stryper, the most famous of the Christian metal bands.
Bob Dylan didn't follow his idol Guthrie in the visions of Jesus in his late '70s, early '80s albums like "Slow Train Coming" and "Saved" - in fact, he was strangely evangelical in his newly found Christian zeal, after years of being a non-practicing Jew.
Cat Stevens also had his own conversion moment, but his faced toward Mecca and he became Yusuf Islam, which stuck much more devoutly than Dylan's dalliance with Christ.
Much more surprising was Prince, the purple adorned provocateur of sex and sleaze, who went from having an unpronounceable symbol for a name to being a Christian scientist, joining the ranks of Val Kilmer.
Punk spirituality is hard to tackle because of an utter rejection of it. In fact, punk was the rebellion against the establishment, and what bigger establishment was there than religion?
Just give a cursory listen to "No God" by The Germs, a song that is exactly what the name suggests. But out of this, like Stryper, Christian punk and ska like Five Iron Frenzy would arise once the Orange County bands dropped the nihilistic and amped up the stupid and showed a pop-punk way that contrasted completely with the original waves.
It's all to say that you can't remove the spiritual, whether in rejection or embrace or satire, from music. There will consistently be the same things that launched popular music, especially apparent in the panderers of pop country to a conservative Christian denominator.
But so, too, will artists like Madonna take religious imagery and either turn it on its head ("Like a Prayer") or explore the bits of trying ("Papa Don't Preach").
And people like Sinead O'Connor, ordained in a non-papist Catholic sect, will rip up pictures of religious icons on national television. And we can't forget my personal favorite, Morrissey, and his example of compounding Catholic guilt into songs like "I Have Forgiven Jesus" and "There is a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends."
Still, too, alternative artists will embrace faith in their own ways. Low, underneath its slow sheen, has a devout belief in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Sufjan Stevens has his own brand of open-armed Christianity.
As long as we are tied to religion, so too will strains of it appear in our popular music, propelling it to new places with old themes and odd fusions.
