The Bible and Music

In class today, we started our focus with reggae music and the culture from Jamaica. We listened to the song, “Rivers of Babylon” by The Melodians. The Melodians were a band from Jamaica and came out with this song in 1972. We discussed the setting of a biblical text that this band utilizes in their song writing and what makes their music unique. I have always enjoyed listening to varieties of reggae music, but never really researched their culture and religious beliefs. There are several versions of the song, “Rivers by Babylon” and each one has a different voice with altering instruments that give the song individuality. The song produced by The Melodians changed entire lines from Psalm 137 and even chose to copy lines straight from the biblical passage to insert into their lyrics. This was interesting to me because I wanted to get a better grasp on setting a biblical text to music and my project is similar to their style in that I will insert some of my own ideas and some will come straight from the chapter in the Bible that I am looking at. We continued the class by looking at different versions of songs like, “Hallelujah” and what makes each version different.

We finished the class by discussing the idea of popular music having biblical text connections and what stuck out to each person in doing the scavenger hunt. I was surprised by the variety of types of music that had biblical allusions and how many songs that the band U2 had that somehow related to The Bible. Several of my choices in the Scavenger Hunt were from this rock band.