Today's Musical Negro League
Contemporary Christian Music
Mark Joseph
April 1, 1997
Millions of baseball fans watched in awe as Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig, Cy Young, Walter Johnson and other legends dominated the game
in the first half of this century. Few then knew of, nor remember today, men like Rube Foster, Martin Dihigo, Ray Dandridge, or Cool Papa Bell. These, too, are some of the greatest players ever to grip a ball, but they were never allowed one pitch at the Sultan of Swat or a single swing at a Walter Johnson fastball.
The Negro Leagues were the result of a collusion on the part of racists like baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Negro League team owners whose financial well-being rested on the very premise of separate-but-equal. It was a most comfortable arrangement: The Major
Leagues remained all-white and the Negro League owners made lots of money. The African-American players, who wanted to be baseball players, not Negro baseball players—and the fans—were the losers.
That color barrier is gone today, but another barrier—based on faith—continues in the world of entertainment. The entertainers affected this time are not athletes but musicians. As with baseball, strange bedfellows have colluded to keep musicians with orthodox Christian beliefs in the modern-day musical equivalent of the Negro Leagues—the Contemporary Christian
Music (ccm) industry. (While ccm artists have clearly been steered away from pop culture, their ordeal is similar to that of black Americans over the years only in method, not degree.)
This cooperation between naive Christians and militant secularists means that most Americans have never heard the music of brilliant artists like Larry Norman, Steve Taylor, Charlie Peacock, Paul Clark, Russ Taff, Phil Keaggy, Rex Carroll, ...
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