Kelly Joe Phelps got me back into church.  Not in the way my grandparents would probably like me to be, with a firm faith in the inspired Bible and the teachings of the apostles, but into church nonetheless.

A couple winters ago I got a tip from a friend that Kelly Joe would be playing in Minneapolis where I was living, and that I should check him out. All I knew was that he played country blues with a slide on his guitar, and that he was playing with a songwriter that I already knew and liked.

So I went to the show. It was in a little smoky dive bar behind a bowling alley. The muffled roar of pins and bowlers bounced against a side wall. I got a seat right next to the old wooden stage. I had my feet propped up and pulled the heavy theater curtain to one side so I could get a good view of the musicians, seated only a few feet from me. The perfect way to hear live music.  Kelly Joe was sitting closest to me. The main performer played several songs until he broke a guitar string, and then he asked Kelly Joe, who had been adding tasteful slide fills to that point, to play a song while he replaced the string.

Kelly Joe played his song. I can't remember what the words were or the tune or even the general idea of the song. All I remember is that as he finished, I, along with the sixty or so other people in the audience, sat stunned. We didn't know whether to applaud, bow down, or rip our clothes and smear ashes on our foreheads. I've never been so moved by a performance as that few minutes of singing and slide guitar.  The other performer was impressed too. 'I gotta break more strings,' he chuckled.

That night I went home and turned my guitar over and found something heavy and metal and tried to summon that same soulful sound out of the wood. I quit in frustration after a few minutes. It's taken me this long to realize that what I really wanted to find was that same emotional longing and ache that I heard in Kelly Joe's voice that night. The kind of sound that goes down inside of me and grabs ahold of something I don't have a name for, grabs it and twists. Hard.  Makes me want to laugh and cry and sing and move. I wanted that desire, that simple expression of basic humanity.
Granted, Kelly Joe is a superb guitar player. I've tried to imitate some of his playing on my guitars, and well, the results are better left at home.  His songs are deep in the heart of that most distinctive of American music, southern country blues. He plays with the guitar across his lap, with a heavy metal bar in his left hand and with his bare right hand picks and bangs out a whole lot of great music.  He started as a jazz player, playing bass and gigging around the Portland, Oregon area when he was in his late teens.  After teaching music at some area colleges and playing jazz, sometime in his late 20s several things coalesced for him, both musically and personally, and he gave away all his jazz records and instruments, got one guitar set up for slide guitar and devoted himself to the blues.

His playing reflects that early jazz style. He improvises freely, both lyrically and musically, allowing the song to find its own way through his hands and voice.  But the music is definitely the country blues: lost love, traveling, hurt, longing and old time religion.  His first album, Lead Me On, is a collection of songs by old blues masters and a few originals, all played in his distinctive style.

His second and most recent album, Roll Away the Stone, is something else, though. The improvisational jazz influence shines through, definitely. His playing is at once more sparse and integrated with his voice, and he sings mostly his own songs, plus a few arrangements of some traditional and older blues songs.

I could tell you that Roll Away the Stone is beautiful, aching, moving music, like someone playing a violin with a broken whiskey bottle.  I could tell you that, musically, I haven't heard a finer performance in a long time. From a songwriting standpoint, Kelly Joe marries word and music seamlessly, his voice, as he put it, like a seventh string on his guitar.

But those are words about something that is inherently not a verbal thing. There's something absolutely qualitatively different about speaking 'I want to roll away the stone' and hearing Kelly Joe sing those same words.

This album moves me in a way that this jaded, cynical 20something postevangelical fellow can't articulate.  When I brought it home last summer, I didn't take it out of my cd player for months. Even now it goes with me on all my travels, of which there have been many in the last year. And it's got me back into church.

After I heard Kelly Joe perform that first time, I knew I needed music. Needed to get it into my self in a way I hadn't done before. I started playing in public, on the street, in coffeehouses, in bars, any place that would let me come and sing and play my guitar. I visited this church in downtown Saint Paul, organized (if you want to call it that) by some other ambivalent evangelical types, including some former OE students. And I volunteered to play in the house band. They did this old time music, the kind that Kelly Joe played, with real instruments and a lighthearted approach I really liked. I sat in the back of the band on Sunday evenings and added little slide guitar fills to the music. It was fun. It moved me sometimes. But I needed it. Needed to risk letting the desire for which I was looking get close and sit next to me. We sang songs of pleading, of longing, of joy, of prayer. It was the old time religion, like when I was kid, but different. More playful, more conscious but less self-conscious.

We even learned an old song from Kelly Joe's recording, "When the Roll is Called up Yonder," played in a moving, blues style unlike it's original arrangement.  It was a hit with the church crowd.

I love all the songs on Roll Away the Stone, from the mournful blues of the title song, to the simple hopefulness of When the Roll is Called up Yonder", to the fingerpicking bounce of "Footprints", to the dark 12-string slide of "See that My Grave is Kept Clean," the yearning assurance of his version of "That's Alright", to the rousing slide instrumental of the concluding "Doxology." But one song in particular tears at me.

I was driving out to my friends' home on Christmas Eve, and though I had heard it many times, 'Without the Light' got to me so much I had to pull off to the side of the road to keep from swerving into a tree or a ditch for all the blurry tears I had in my eyes.  Kelly Joe sings in a slow melancholy voice, guitar echoing the melody,

Where my sorrow goes
there I'll be
water runs up
through my door
and washes me clean
of my childhood
dirt on the floor a reminder

well I can't tell you
how i am afraid
crossing that river again
on a boat
takes in more than it floats on above
and silently moves
to the bottom.

no where can i
draw shadows
i can see better
without the light

hard times give me
your open arms
make me a pallet
lord to lie in
get down
and hold me so i
won't try to run away
and cover my eyes
o, to mourn
you still me father
above me and longer behind
darker and kind
darker and kind
darker and kind

That was the best part of my Christmas, that song and what it touched in me.

I am obviously a fan of Kelly Joe Phelps, not just because he plays great music or writes great songs or even because his performances are so riveting and moving. Mostly I like him because I recognize in his music an honest and searing search, through the religious language, idioms and songs in which we were both raised, for that spirit that blows free through the meadows at sunset, though the alleys after dark, through the gutters and graveyards, through the cities and countrysides that we, that all human beings, call home for now.  I am grateful for his courage and honesty and musical talent. And I feel lucky to have met him and shook his hand, not because I believe he is someone who has arrived, but because he is someone who is genuinely on the way, his way, toward some better home.