"A single thread ties most of rock 'n' roll’s pioneers together: From Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis to Little Richard and James Brown, many of the founding giants of rock grew up in Pentecostal churches. Pentecostal services were dramatic affairs. Worshipers shouted and danced until they fell to the floor, then sprang back up, healed of what had ailed them or speaking in tongues. Behind the hellfire preaching and general pandemonium was hot music: pianos and drums, tambourines and triangles, saxophones and trumpets, all whipping the congregation into ecstasy. Skeptical journalists and respectable Christians alike scoffed at the miracle cures and snickered at the 'thinly veiled eroticism of the devotees,' but as one black Pentecostal told a curious anthropologist, 'A lot of folks talk about getting too emotional. I wouldn't give two cents for a religion that wouldn't make me move.'"
Paul W. Gleason at The Hedgehog Review reviews Randall J. Stephens's The Devil's Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock 'n' Roll.
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