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In 1986, Tommy Coomes, member of the pioneering Christian music group Love Song and longtime producer at Maranatha! Music, wrote on the front page of the first issue of Worship Times magazine,1 "As teenagers we older baby boomers began an enduring love affair with a new style of music that spoke to our restless, independent spirits. And rock 'n roll is here to stay. We are infatuated with the music of our past."2 Coomes may be pleased to know that not only baby boomer musicians and industry insiders share his infatuation: recent scholarship3 has also centralized rock music and the guitar in the history of contemporary praise and worship music (hereafter, CPW and CPWM).4 The guitar has been credited in new forms of music for worship so consistently that by 1999, Michael Hamilton wrote in Christianity Today of "The Triumph of the Praise Song: How Guitars Beat Out the Organ in the Worship Wars," equating "Praise Song" with the guitar itself. 5 This article has been widely noted in the scholarship of CPWM and the Christianity Today cover image-featuring a happy-golucky guitar dancing on top of a very worried-looking organ/upright piano-has struck a chord (see Figure 1).
Seeing the Guitar for What It Is
One reason for the popularity of Hamilton's essay is that it reinforces a wider perception of the image of the guitar as emblematic of "the contemporary" in American evangelical church music. This is true for both proponents and critics alike in popular magazines, blogs,6 and academic liturgical history books.7 Though musical styles in the history of CPWM have been diverse,8 the guitar as its emblem has not.
The image of the guitar functions not simply as an emblem to represent CPW. It has also become an icon for understanding the reality of CPW. This image has colored an entire field of liturgical historical research. Through the guitar, scholarship has been able to note the significance for CPW of folk and rock music in the Jesus People Movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, and the "worship awakening"9 or "British invasion"10 of modern rock style in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the first case, cultural historians and sociologists have rightly been very interested in understanding the influence of the...