“God told me to give my records away”: Keith Green and the Ethics of Commerce in the 1970s U.S. Christian Music Industry

Society for American Music

SAM, online, June 9, 2021.

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

Abstract

“God just told me to start my own label and give my records away.” So spoke Keith Green, a Christian songwriter and performer signed to U.S.-based label Sparrow Records, to Billy Ray Hearn, Sparrow’s founder and owner, in 1979. Launched in 1976, Sparrow operated wholly in the then-nascent market for Christian rock and popular music. Hearn intentionally kept the artist roster small so he could pay personal attention to each release. Releasing Green from his contract would dramatically impact his business and ability to support other artists in their music (and ministry) careers. Green, however, was convicted that his music could not minister to those who most needed to hear God’s message unless it was freely available. In an interview many years later, Hearn recounted to me, “Of course, I did it, because when God’s telling somebody to do something, I’m not going to stand in the way.” Decades before Radiohead’s In Rainbows (2007) pay-what-you-will experiment, Green released his third album, So You Wanna Go Back to Egypt (1980), independently from Sparrow for free or donation. In this paper, I examine Keith Green’s career within the U.S. Christian music industry to illustrate how one artist navigated the delicate balance of ethical and commercial imperatives in media industries. Incorporating perspectives on music, ethics, and religion from ethnomusicologists Timothy Rommen (2007) and Jeffers Engelhardt (2015), I argue that ethical objectives can be just as important as aesthetic or commercial ones, particularly in their ability to establish markets’ boundaries.