Last week, I visited Ottumwa, Iowa, where I lived as a child in the early 1970s. Ottumwa is a relatively small town (population 25,000) and I thought that I caught there some images of shifts in smaller-town America: a once vibrant and now sleepy downtown, a community of once charming (and remarkably stately) middle class homes fallen frequently now into disrepair. Among the primary employers are a community college, Hy-Vee and Wal-Mart, and Cargill Meat Solutions and John Deere.

While I walked through the downtown, I noticed two storefronts that, in their juxtaposition, hinted at another American story. There was the Heartland Assembly, an evangelical church, right next door to the offices of Ottumwa radio stations.

Three of the four stations were music-oriented, and featured “today’s hits and yesterday’s favorites,” “classic rock,” and “new country.”

This local next-doorness of a Christian church and pop music radio stations made me immediately think about the larger history of the intermingling of religion and rock and roll, from its origins to the present, but it also made me wonder about the ways that the relationship between the two is communicated on a local level. This was a nice symbol of it, and reminded me of what I

experienced growing up in Independence, Missouri (where my family moved after Ottumwa): being surrounded at once by a Christian culture of churches, images, talk, and people, and at the same time by ever-present radio culture offering Lynyrd Skynyrd to Led Zeppelin. Many of my friends and colleagues who came from more robustly urban and more racially diverse backgrounds often speak of church culture and rap/hip hop culture playing complementary supporting roles at young ages for them as well.

How is it that in your life, religion and music came to be meaningful places that you wanted to try to relate to each other? It is easy to talk of general currents in the shared histories of religion and rock and roll, but things often get more interesting when people start to tell stories about how they came to value both or to find themselves meaningfully in between both. I thought that the adjoining storefronts, above, neatly symbolized one way that Ottumwa, Iowa, is getting its religion and its music. I am probably not the only Ottumwan who has had to figure out what it is like to live in that small space between those two storefronts, or to try to break down the walls between them.

Tommy Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

1 Comment »

1. 

   Richard Nixon was stationed in Ottumwa during World War II and it was the hometown of Radar O’Reilly from “MASH” as well. Not sure what that means but…

   Comment by fred herron — July 26, 2012 @ 1:56 pm

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