About 1982 my family and I moved to Coal City, Indiana and I reconnected with a friend of mine I hadn’t seen for a couple of years. His name was Richard, and he was a musician, too. I was playing strictly acoustic guitar in those days, and he loaned me one of his amplifiers and an electronic effects unit for guitar. (For you guitar geeks out there, it was an Ibanez rackmount unit with compressor, overdrive, chorus, flanger and phaser.) All of this opened up a whole new world of wonderful sounds to explore.
Even more significantly, he loaned me an album of contemporary Christian music. It was an LP (I know, I’m an old guy) recorded by Dion, of “Dion and the Belmonts” fame. Dion had some top-40 hits in the sixties and seventies with songs like “Runaround Sue” and “Abraham, Martin and John.” But later Dion became a Christian and began to record Christian music. His music was a revelation to me. He sang the Gospel, clear and true, but in his own style, with guitar, bass, drums, and a Hammond B-3 organ. It was fantastic.
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