“Find a Way”: Amy Grant and Christian Pop’s Mainstream Crossover

American Musicological Society

AMS, Boston, Massachusetts, November 1, 2019.

This paper’s title is taken from a song by Amy Grant.

Material from this paper was published in God Rock, Inc.

Abstract

The market for contemporary Christian music, or CCM, a style of commercial popular music, has long relied on infrastructures parallel to the mainstream music industries for its production, distribution, and consumption. As Don Cusic (2012), Larry Eskridge (2013), and others have documented, this segmentation has both reflected and reproduced a stratification between white evangelical Christian and mainstream pop music (“general market”) consumers in the U.S. Although general market music publishers and record labels had distributed a variety of religious musics throughout much of the twentieth century, by the mid-1970s most white pop artists who publicly self-identified as Christian were relegated to the Christian market, largely marginal to mainstream pop and its metrics of success (Billboard charts, critical assessment, Grammy awards, news/media features, etc.).

When CCM singer Amy Grant’s single “Baby Baby” topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart on April 27, 1991, it was the first time in recent memory that a Christian artist had a #1 general market single. This was a significant event for Grant, her songwriting partners and management team, her record labels, and CCM fans that felt sudden and unprecedented to many, but “Baby Baby” was no fluke hit. In this paper I argue that Amy Grant’s success was the cumulative result of longer strategies to cross her over from the relatively small Christian market to the massive general mainstream pop market. Archival research reveals business and artistic decisions that prepared Grant for her first attempt at crossover with the 1985 album Unguarded. Not all of these decisions were supported by CCM fans: discourse about the boundaries of the Christian market in CCM magazine reached a higher pitch in late 1985, as Grant’s first crossover singles climbed (and descended) the Billboard charts. Her 1988 album Lead Me On reoriented Grant towards the Christian market, but this proved to be a lull and not a reversal of crossover attempts. The sonic dimensions and marketing strategies of 1991’s Heart in Motion, for which “Baby Baby” was the lead single, evidence an intention—necessarily long in planning—for Grant to compete with other mainstream pop artists of the era.