The Last Twentieth Century Book Club: Jazz Goes to Church

Interior from The Lutheran

By Don Jolly

They met in the late forties, in high school, in Pennsylvania. She sang, he played the flute. Jack Herrera and Bettie Jane Stotlemyer were married in 1952. He went into the Army that same year.

Little more than a decade later, at the height of Jack’s artistic fame, his biography became a minor point of interest for the press. “I play clarinet, sax, oboe, flute bassoon and string bass,” he told the Washington Post in 1966. “I was with dance bands and had by own combos up and down the East Coast and into the Midwest.

“I played carnivals and fairs, did club work all over and was in the orchestra pit at the Roxy in New York. Once I was a side man with Billy May.”

In the Army, Jack “was made an artillery officer,” the Post continued. He “went to Korea, where he was wounded.” Then, he was “transferred to the 89^th Army Band at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.” It was there, in 1954, that he and Bettie’s first daughter, Lynda, was born.

Last week, I spoke with their youngest, Pam Stilton, on the telephone. She lives in Virginia. “I remember we went down to the Korean War Memorial when it opened [in 1986],” she told me. “Have you seen the memorial?”

When I was a kid, my parents and I took a night tour of Washington D.C. The memorial was one of our stops, and I remember it. I remember bedraggled soldiers, cast in metal, walking across a lawn, looking anxiously at one another. Each was illuminated by a spotlight hidden in the grass, and either these lights were strong enough to kill the stars or it was overcast or just not paying attention. The sky was black.

It was raining, and I remember the drops of water sliding down the faces of the statues, shot-through with white and the brakelight red.

It must have been overcast.

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s beautiful,” she continued. “It’s a troupe of soldiers with their garb on – rain jackets, helmets – and they’re looking at each other as they’re walking through a rice patty. As you walk through the memorial, you feel like you are part of a unit. It’s beautiful.

“So my father and I are walking through, and he says, ‘This really takes me back; I lost so many friends.’

“I reminded my father, ‘Dad, you never served in Korea.’

“In his mind he was completely convinced that he had seen – what do call it? –‘action’. All he did was play clarinet in the Army band.”

Jack couldn’t have been wounded, she explained. His postings were all musical. His unit wasn’t even the 89^th, as the Post had reported – it was the 49^th. “There was a little confusion on my father’s part,” said Pam.

“In the last five years of his life, he suffered from dementia… After leaving D.C. in the 60s, he went out to California and really embraced the whole bohemian lifestyle. He got immersed in the various movements, including drinking, group sex, couple swapping, and drugs,” Pam said. “It was at this time that he began to come up with a different history.”

***

In 1956, according to the Post, Herrera felt himself compelled. “I simply knew I should go into the ministry,” he told them. Jack attended the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg. It was there, in 1958, that Herrera performed his first worship service with the accompaniment of jazz.

“It was the first time the school had done anything like that,” he told The Washingtonian magazine, nine years later. “There were some dissenters, of course, but generally reaction was very good.”

Herrera’s experiment was only a small part of the nascent “sacred jazz” movement. For the next decade, many prominent jazz musicians produced music predicated on Christian themes, sometimes even performing it in churches. Churches, meanwhile, turned to jazz musicians for novelty – the music, many believed, had the potential to keep worship “current.”

“If the church is going to meet the needs of young people, it must recognize the fact that ‘The Old Rugged Cross,’ is not a very real part of our contemporary society,” said Ed Summerlin, a talented clarinetist and saxophone player, in a statement on the matter to Downbeat magazine.

In 1959, while studying music at North Texas State College, Summerlin learned that his newborn daughter, Mary Jo, was suffering from a congenital heart defect. On the night she died, January 27^th, 1959, Summerlin met the Reverend Bill Slack Jr., of the First Methodist Church in Denton. They became fast friends. Slack suggested that Summerlin might put his grief to music, in the form of church service.

Summerlin’s jazz setting for John Wesley’s liturgy was premiered at the Perkins Chapel of Southern Methodist University in May of that same year. Ecclesia issued an L.P. version shortly thereafter. Downbeat gave it four and half stars.

***

In 1955, the Herrera family moved to Paradise, Pennsylvania, where Jack was given his first parish. They moved around over the next decade, ranging as far afield as Texas. At one point, Herrera had a parish in Battle Creek, Michigan. “They were there for several years and loved it,” Pam Stilton told me. “I have letters from members of the congregation, including several from the ladies groups, who loved him and my mother.

“He was the best shoulder to cry on; the best person to talk to about spiritual things… He gave incredible services,” she told me. At home, however, Jack was more distant. “My sister always said, ‘he was a father to everyone in the congregation but me.’”

“My mother took being a pastor’s wife very, very seriously,” Pam recalled. Jack took it seriously, too. He expected Bettie to maintain a certain tightness of appearance at all times. “She could only wear high-necked black, brown or navy-blue dresses,” said Stilton. “She had to act a certain way. If she didn’t, he’d become very angry.”

“At this point in his pastoral career, he was beginning to have affairs,” Pam continued. “Looking back, [my mother] said ‘I knew it, but I didn’t want to see it.’ People would pull her aside and say, ‘Bettie, this is what’s going on.’”

“You must remember that for women in any church – past, present or future,” Pam said, “screwing the pastor is the ultimate screw. You’re screwing somebody next to God.”

***

In July of 1966, the Herrera family moved to Washington, D.C., where Jack had been hired as an assistant pastor at Luther Place Memorial Church. Luther Place was a popular and progressive institution located in Thomas Circle, across the street from National City Christian Church, where President Johnson attended services.

A couple enters Luther Place (The Lutheran)

“Luther Place Church in Washington D.C., probably hasn’t changed much in appearance since it was built in 1873,” wrote the religious journalist William A. Harper in 1967, for The Lutheran magazine. “It has an almost medieval look, with its spires and steeples […] but its surroundings have changed a lot.” Massive apartment buildings were springing up on its surrounding blocks. Herrera, as “pastor for community missions,” was brought on to help evangelize to them – and to other aimless souls.

“In the mile radius around Luther Place, there are some 73,000 people living in high– rise buildings, and only 4 or 5 percent go to church,” Herrera told the Post that year. “These are people who are trying to purchase a special kind of privacy and seeming independence. Some seek the appearance of a certain type of sophistication – the Pepsi-generation bit.” To reach them, Herrera figured, the church would have to be sophisticated, too.

Jack ministered to the people in the high rises, whom he referred to, in print, as “cliff-dwellers.” On Sunday afternoons at one, he led a series of contemporary worship services, assisted by a trio of musicians he’d met at an Eleventh 11th Street night club called, the Bohemian Caverns. There was was Gene Rush on piano, Steve Novosel on bass, and Jimmy Hopps on drums – the Trio E.S.P. Jack preached; they played.

Harper, attended one of their services in 1967. “If you want to take part in a happening on Sunday afternoon, you don’t have to go to DuPont Circle or to a ‘be in’ at P Street Beach,” he wrote. “Just stop by Luther Place at 1 p.m.”

Harper observed about 150 people filling the pews of the grand old place. “Some were casually dressed,” he said. “Men without ties and some with beards, a few girls in miniskirts.” Eventually, the Trio began to play its prelude. “They made the church come alive with harmonious but jarring sounds.

“It was, as they say, cool.”

***

By the mid–sixties, sacred jazz was at the peak of its public prominence. Duke Ellington was in the midst of performing his “sacred concerts,” the first of which had premiered at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral in 1965. In these special performances, Ellington gave voice to his personal religious convictions through jazz.

“In this program, you may hear a wide variety of statements without words,” Ellington wrote, in the program note for his Grace Cathedral premiere. “I think you should know that if it is a phrase with six tones, it symbolizes the six syllables in the first four words of the Bible, ‘In the beginning God.” This is “our theme,” he continued. “We say it many times … many ways. “

In 1966, Ebony magazine printed a story on the sacred jazz phenomenon. They called it “Jazz Goes to Church.”

“The ability to play good jazz is a gift from God,” said the pianist Mary Lou Williams, to Ebony. “This music is based on spirituals – it’s our only original American art form – and should be played everywhere, including church.” Still, she acknowledged, things could go wrong.

“Jazz must be honest,” Williams continued, “and the artist who attempts to play it must believe in what he’s doing or he will find his insincerity reflected in his music. If it’s played without the right inner feeling, especially in a church, it just won’t come off.”

There were other dangers, too. For a time, Christian conservatives and jazz-scene atheists found themselves united in disdain. Some of the faithful felt that jazz was too grimy, that it has a “profane and worldly character.” The latter quotation comes the Vatican, which officially banned the use of the jazz mass in 1967. The year before, Ellington had tried to play a sacred concert in his hometown of Washington, D.C., only to be publically rebuked by the city’s Baptist Ministers Conference. Ellington “is opposed to what the church stands for,” said a spokesman for the conference in Jet magazine, that December. His “night club playing” and the “worldly” nature of his music were cited as special concerns.

“If I was a dishwasher or a waiter in a nightclub, does that mean I couldn’t join their church?” Ellington asked, rhetorically. “What’s the matter, doesn’t God accept sinners anymore?”

***

His experiences in nightclubs and bars, Herrera told the Post, had given him “a tremendous knowledge of life – something a minister today has to have if he is to go out to the people at the wells of life.”

After all, “that’s what our Lord did.”

While trawling D.C.’s nightlife, Jack made friends with a man named Tony Taylor. Taylor owned and operated the Bohemian Caverns, the club where Herrera had met the Trio E.S.P..

“Tony was the one who encouraged him to reach out to the community of lost souls by going to strip clubs,” Pam Stilton told me. “When it started, they would have a real kind of ministry at bars or in the streets, but eventually – there was no ministry.”

The nightclub owner exerted a noticeable influence on Herrera, encouraging him to push his “bohemian” inclinations farther and farther. By 1967, things were at a breaking point. Jack was “always looking at pornography, always going to strip clubs,” Pam said. “His drive became so strong, it was taking over his life. Finally, the church said, ‘That’s it; you’re out of here.’”

“He didn’t walk out,” she clarified. “He was asked to go.”

In November of 1967, Father Jack Herrera and the Trio E.S.P. took their act on the road. Herrera and Trio found themselves in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, offering an “experience in contemporary jazz worship” to interested college students.

The Daily Mail from Hagerstown, Maryland sent someone to cover the event. “At 8 p.m. the hall was full,” wrote the reporter, “but the speaker failed to appear. Rev. Herrera did not appear until 8:45, by which time half the congregation had gone home.” The few who stayed enjoyed themselves.

“Pastor Herrera sat on a stool holding a clarinet and a microphone and carried on a dialogue with the congregation,” said The Daily Mail. “A contemporary prayer was accompanied by the pianist and drummer playing the Beatles’ ‘Yesterday.’”

Shortly thereafter, Jack left his family. He moved to California. Bettie and the girls had to fend for themselves.

***

In 1968, Herrera and his trio, with Tony Taylor serving as producer, released an L.P. with the Enterprise imprint of Atlantic Records. It was one of Herrera’s contemporary services, recorded live. They called it “Jazz Goes to Church.”

“These are the days of the miniskirt, megaton, macro-riot and Mayan,” wrote Taylor, in its liner notes. “They present new problems that demand new answers,” he said. “There’s no room for phonies anymore, especially over the long haul.”

What was needed was honestly, of the style Mary Lou Williams had demanded in 1966. With that in mind, said the producer, “I want to introduce one of the very honest and genuine men I have had the pleasure of being associated with for the last year or so: The Reverend Jack Herrera.”

Herrera, Taylor explained, had lived a textured and highly variable life. He was “a man who has seen life in some of its more basic and debased forms.” This experience, according to Taylor, “caused [Herrera] to seek out a reservoir of love within himself to help fill the void of love he found in the lives of others.”

“It is my contention that what has resulted is a liberated kind of religious experience that applies itself to today,” wrote the producer.

It didn’t set the world on fire.

***

Pam Stilton was born in 1965. She was too young to personally remember life at Luther Place or her father’s last years in the ministry. “Once he left my sister and me, he completely separated from us. He became immersed in this other lifestyle.”

When Herrera moved to California, he began running with a particularly high-dollar crowd of musicians, artists and democratic politicians. While he visited family back East frequently, he spent most his time with relatives of his second wife. “He was […] in Virginia, staying on a farm for a week or two,” Pam told me, but he’d only spend “a couple of hours” out of each visit with Bettie’s girls.

“We lost our father,” she concluded.

Herrera bragged about hanging around with Linda Ronstadt and Jerry Brown. For a time, he lived in a San Francisco warehouse that had been converted into a kind of urban commune. Over the next few decades, Jack pursued a career in public service. He went on to serve the State of California, first as the Director of its Department of Veteran’s Affairs and then its Department of Mental Health Services.

He offered no financial assistance to Bettie’s girls. Still, they were successful. Pam spent a decade in the advertising industry. Working for DDB Needham (then the second largest agency in the world) she advanced from secretarial position to Vice President and Director of Traffic Services. Today, she owns and operates an award-winning boarding facility for dogs and cats.

Bettie and her daughters were “like the three musketeers,” Pam told me. She lived with Bettie 44 years, and when her mother died, Pam said, it was “in the loving arms of her daughters.”

Things were rockier with Jack. “At the time he left, he said that he had to do what was right for him,” Pam explained.. “Every time I hear that comment – ‘I have to be true to myself’ — on T.V. or whatever – I want to scream. I’m sorry, that’s bullshit.”

***

The voice of Jack Herrera, on “Jazz Goes to Church,” is clear and clean. Its charisma is a matter of precision.

His sermon began, “How interesting it is in a world today with much sophistication and affluence, that we no longer as persons and people of God are able to knit our souls together with anyone.”

Cover of The Lutheran, 1967

“This is an age of technological change,” he continued. “And I’m sure all of you have heard, time and time again, that it is a deeply impersonal world […] The real question, it seems to me, is: are there any more persons who care? Is there a friend who thinks enough of me to relate himself to me in some visible fashion, so that his soul is knit to me? When we consider, then, this great fact of life, we recognize that we must establish ‘covenantal relationships.’”

“Now that’s Old Testament,” said Herrera. “Some say, ‘well , that’s Jewish,’, well, that’s good! We love Jews, we love Anglicans, we love Presbyterians, Lutherans, we love each other. We love negroes. We’re all God’s children.”

Regardless of race, creed or type, the Reverend explained, we must love one another as God loved the descendants of Abraham.

“God said to the people of Israel: ‘I will love you in a steadfast love’ – in the Hebrew, the word is ‘chesed.’” The old term meant, “steadfast, never–changing, always dependable,” Herrera explained. The modern world had made such changeless love a rarity.

“If you will note on the bulletin for today, there is a prayer,” Herrera continued. “That prayer suggests what we have become.”

He delivered it, colloquially:

“Father of men — You who call us as children to live for one another, we confess that we live for ourselves – and who will not agree with me, here? – for our own good first – and who will dare not to agree? – and then only for the good of others.

“We have become so anxious for ourselves that we lose sight of others. We scarcely care for those whom we know – and isn’t that true? – and much less for those whom we do not know.

In sum: “We cultivate relationships for what we can get out of them.”

“Y’know, I don’t see people demonstrating for excellence,” he mused, later in the sermon. I don’t see them demonstrating for higher virtue,” he concluded. “If anyone wants to demonstrate, let’s demonstrate for love!”

Why hadn’t anybody thought of it before?

***

At one point, Pam told me, “My father swore […] that he was one of the people in Pompeii when the eruption happened.”

“He completely embraced reincarnation,” she continued. But only for a little while.

Jack Herrera died on August 16, 2010. One week prior to his death, he had his last phone conversation with Pam. He wanted “forgiveness”, she said, “for his selfish actions.”

“He said, ‘I love you, and I need you forgive me. I cannot die unless you forgive me for everything I did to you.’”

Over the years, Jack and Pam had often been at loggerheads. He hadn’t felt guilty about what he’d done in Washington and afterwards. It was all necessary, he thought.

“We were both very stubborn,” Pam explained. “We both wanted to be right, and when you want that, you lose a lot of time.”.

“It is my deepest regret that I lost so much time with him,” she said. “We could have been friends and shared more of life together.”

Her voice, distant on the phone line, began to crack. “I told him, ‘of course I forgive you. I forgave you years ago. We may not have had a relationship here on earth, but we will see each other again.”

“I needed to know what he really believed and was overjoyed when he professed his faith. He believed in Jesus.”

One week later, he died.

“He donated his body to science, of course,” Pam chuckled.

***

Jazz, as Mary Lou Williams observed, began in the church. In truth, it never really left. Today, jazz continues to be used in services – albeit with far less controversy than in the 1960s. The press, for the most part, still treats “sacred jazz” as an innovative incongruity.

Duke Ellington may have played in churches, acknowledged a writer for the Atlantic in 2013, but “what’s different now is that churches of varying perspectives and racial identities” have undertaken “a strategy of using jazz to attract disaffected believers.”

Presumably, the Pepsi-generation remains elusive.

The very idea of “sacred jazz” as a movement or a subculture implies that most jazz is identifiably “secular.” This is more than a matter of semantics. The story of “sacred jazz” is, really, the story of watchmen walking the high walls of American religion, attempting to keep its contents tight and well defined.

In this, Jack Herrera’s work at Luther Place was more than a little like the work of the Baptist Minister’s Conference in that same city. Both needed “jazz” to be one thing and “religion” another. For the Baptists, this had to do with keeping something wild and threatening out of the tabernacle. Herrera, by contrast, wanted to let the wilderness in – he just wanted, very badly, to be the doorman.

“Wisdom is something that man partially enjoys,” wrote Ellington, in his program note for his first sacred concert in 1965. “God has total understanding.

“There are some people who speak in one language and some who speak many languages.

“Every man prays in his own language, and there is no language that God does not understand.”

***

At the close of his sermon on “Jazz Goes to Church,” Herrera’s voice drops a register. He grows serious.

“What kind of a brother are you to anyone?” he asks.

“Do you believe in God?

“Do you accept this story as one that is filled with meaning?

“Are you only concerned with yourself first, then others?

“If so, that which happened to Saul may well happen to you.

“And if you don’t remember what happened, read the Bible! You’ll see.

“When one falls out of love with God and his fellow man, only death waits for him – eternal.”

Amen.