As many of you know, I’m in the process of writing the 28 Pagan Musicians in 28 Days series for the blog in February. What a trip down memory lane this is! Although I’m covering a wide range of musical types, there has been quite a resurgent interest in Old Guard / Old School pagan music (60′s thru the 80′s/90′s), so I’m letting my memories guide my research on that front.

The original pagan music sort of emerged from the 60’s and early 70’s mainstream folk-style music. When you listen to the old school pagan music, you are going to find most of them pretty much fall into certain categories: pagan folk, synthesized new age, nature, and “personal growth”/subliminal.

My favorite old time pagan music is pagan folk. It was within that genre that risks were actually taken in order to give birth to pagan music by containing lyrics about the Goddess, the Horned God, circle rounds, etc. That meant a lot to us old-timers.

If you did not have experiences from that culture and time period, there’s a few really important things to keep in mind. First, old school pagan music was UNDERGROUND. Seriously underground. It was emerging during a time when you could get a brick through your front window if you were publicly known to be a witch. A real brick. Things like that really happened. Most of us stayed underground. The possible danger to us, our families, and our livelihood were very prominent. However, there were some brave witches and pagans that took that risk to step out of those cultural restrictions for our religious freedoms. Those are the very people that worked to gain the cultural freedoms we have today. Is it perfect for us now? No. But without the old school witches and pagans stepping out, we wouldn’t have what we have now.

Were the old school witches and pagans perfect? Nope. They weren’t and they weren’t all out there for the highest of motivations either. Some just wanted to be what was called “Hollywood Witches”. However, we know that even when it “appears” that someone is doing something for their own person reasons, we will see in time that it was Her hand that gave them whatever type of motivation they needed to do Her will. Her will was that we should be able to do what we are doing now – going to gatherings in a public places, writing publicly on the internet, having a pentagram on a military grave, etc.

Why did we love old school pagan musicians? I once had someone ask if us old witches were tone-deaf back in the day (*chuckles). No. We weren’t tone deaf, but we loved and still love our early pagan musicians for other reasons. They took risks of being criticized (possibly attacked) politically, culturally, and artistically so that we would have SOMETHING religious when there was little to nothing. Perfection was not the aim.

As I am researching for this upcoming series, I realize that what they are doing is just as important as how they are doing it. If I was writing about another religious venue (say Christian Rock), I could dedicate an entire website or whole book full of the artists. In our religion, however, my “list” of pagan musicians is only two typed pages. Although my list doesn’t include underground musicians I haven’t remembered yet or current underground musicians I don’t know about yet, it’s still an amazingly small number of artists for our religion. I think it’s important to give them the kudos and respect they deserve for providing us all with our religious music BEFORE comparing them to modern pop music artists, who have resources and access to recording studios that most of our musicians have never had.

** Personal note: No. I’m not tone-deaf and I have an excellent ear for music and arrangements. My father played with Tommy Dorsey and my mother was a professional vocalist opening act during her day. I carted around more amps (the size of dressers) than you can imagine.

Brightest of Blessings

Mead Muse