Baptism by Song

by Casey N. Cep

There are many ways to take a bath, and just as many ways to perform a baptism. Some Christian traditions sprinkle a little water on the foreheads of infants or adults, drop by holy drop, and call it a day. Immersion is something else, and plenty of denominations have full-body fonts in their sanctuaries — or know where there’s a river or creek nearby deep enough for wading. Lots of hymns are available to mark the occasion, but country music also has its fair share of songs about baptism.

Carrie Underwood had a big hit last year with “Something in the Water,” a song she co-wrote about following a “preacher man down to the river,” experiencing a conversion where you get “washed in the water, washed in the blood.” In his 2008 song, “Muddy Water,” Trace Atkins sang, “There’s a man in me I need to drown,” while almost a decade earlier, Kenney Chesney recorded a beautiful duet with Randy Travis called “Baptism” where “it was down with the old man, up with the new: raised to walk in the ways of light and truth.” That imagery is borrowed from the liturgy itself, which usually begins by evoking the protection of Noah and his family from the flood and the parting of the Red Sea so that the Israelites could pass safely; it’s not only a time to consider the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, but more perilously all the times that people were drowned, right along with their sins.

It is a serious, somber business, and yet if it you’ve done your part and God does God’s part, there is real joy in the idea that the old is made new. Take Randy Travis’s other baptism song, from his gospel album, Rise and Shine: A lighter song, “Pray for the Fish” has a catchy chorus about the piscatorial witnesses to an immersion baptism. “They won’t know what’s coming, when the sin starts rolling off the likes of him. Lord be with ’em, they ain’t done nothin’. Please, won’t you leave them just a little bit of room to swim?”

It’s hard to imagine a religious ritual other than marriage that gets this kind of attention on the radio. But these songs do well because even if you don’t believe in the saving power of the rite, they tell a story of change. These songs are all about men and women who are living a certain kind of life and then decide to live another. That’s why one of my favorites sketches a full life in only a few verses, where the old life is every bit as important and evocative as the new one.

Dallas Frazier and Whitey Shafer wrote “The Baptism of Jesse Taylor” in 1973. “Among the local taverns there’ll be a slack in business” and “among the local women there’ll be a slack in cheatin’,” the song begins. Why? Well, because when “they baptized Jesse Taylor in Cedar Creek last Sunday Jesus gained a soul and Satan lost a good right arm.”

And while a lot of folks have covered this song about a ne’er-do-well who finds religion — everyone from Tanya Tucker to George Jones — it was the Oak Ridge Boys who did it best. By the time they released their version, they’d already won a Grammy, but they won another for it in 1974. The thing about the Oak Ridge Boys cover is that they take you deep down under the water, and then up, up, up toward the heavens. They bounced around between country, gospel, and pop, but it’s a song like “The Baptism of Jesse Taylor” where you really hear their best. They sound like they’ve known more than a few Jesse Taylors, with scarred knuckles that “were more than just respected.” They wallow in the verses about Jesse’s misdeeds, and revel in the ones about his new life. There’s real joy in their mention of his wife Nancy and son Jim: “Now Jimmy’s got a daddy and Jesse’s got a family, and Franklin County’s got a lot more man.”

But man oh man, do they pound the chorus, crying “Hallelujah” with real conviction “when Jesse’s head went under, ’cause this time he went under for the Lord.” You not only hear, but believe both sides of the story: old man and new man, prodigality and piety, sin and salvation. The simultaneous desire for and fear of drowning only works when you know what kind of man is being washed away, so it’s the gambling as much as the goodness that makes “The Baptism of Jesse Taylor” such a good song. A whole life lives in those verses because nothing is not worth mentioning, including “the county courthouse records [that] tell all there is to tell.”

Country Time is an occasional column about country music.