The background to pop music

Paul Gambaccini

As the 400^th anniversary year of the publication of the King James Bible draws to its close, UK DJ Paul Gambaccini has examined the influence of this text in some unexpected places – on the songs of Elvis, George Michael and The Rolling Stones to name but a few.

Where do the stories come from?

Contemporary music draws more consistently on the Old and New Testaments than on any other text. Crossref-it.info already carries a list of literary works whose titles allude to the Bible, but in a recent BBC Radio 4 programme, Gambo reeled off a list of popular songs whose writers were influenced by characters, stories and actual verses from scripture.

Ranging across the genres of rock, blues, country & western, pop and soul, artists keep using biblical references because they anticipate that we, the audience, will have a rich cache of associations to draw on:

• For example, by simply calling the protagonist of his song about betrayed love Delilah, Tom Jones expects us to bring to mind the whole sorry tale of how love for a fickle woman destroyed a hero
  • At Crossref-it.info we know that many may not have that story in their ‘culturalkit-bag’, which is why you can read about it here or in the source version.
• Springsteen’s powerful lyric, Adam raised a Cain, resonates with the whole idea of disappointed idealism, of the inescapability of parental influence and of love bound up with pain – all issues that are seeded by the loss of Eden and Fall of humankind depicted in Genesis 3 and 4.
• The plaintive anthem of the first Shrek film, Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, is actually inspired by the troubled love life of the Old Testament King David.

If you can spare 30 mins, why not listen to the programme, originally broadcast on Saturday 17^th December, 2011.

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