Arthur Alligood: Awkwardly Amazing Artist

Today’s Christian bookstores and radio stations are littered with a wide variety of music. Sadly, a large percentage of that music comes across as heartless, mindless, even pointless. Shallow and thoughtless pop songs with regurgitated secular melodies play more like sugar coated nuggets of Sunday School dogma rather than art with substance and real life relevancy. Supposed praise and worship music is often without depth in its attempt to glorify the greatest artist of us all. Perhaps most saddening of all is that in this relatively new money making machine called the ‘Christian’ music industry, there is little room for true artists with prophetic voices and honest craftsmanship, those who truly seek to make responsible music for their listener and for the Lord. They remain largely unknown and are resigned to the label ‘underground artists,’ because they are often without the promotional backing and marketing of a powerful record company. Instead, they rely on promotion by word of mouth and a handful of dedicated websites that honor their artwork (see: www.grassrootsmusic.com). They minister through their music mostly at colleges, small churches and other small venues.

This past weekend I was privileged to attend one such concert at a tiny church in Warner Robins, Georgia. Located in an older part of town, the church building was hardly in her prime, left over from decades prior, a time long since past and now in her waning years. She was small, made of brick painted white with a red door at the front facing the road. The marquee out front had half its lights blown and looked like it had been that way for some time. The sanctuary itself was a dull off-white with nondescript ceiling tiles and florescent lights. There was no air-conditioning, though that was hardly noticed with the cool early fall climate. Two rows of pews covered with faded carpet led to a slightly raised platform at the front, which was flanked by a few small candles. There may have been an area for a small choir behind the pulpit. The only substantial features of the whole room were a few stained-glass windows that flanked both walls of the sanctuary, but it was late evening and the stories in the windows had lost their light, their storyteller hidden behind the horizon.

The doors to the tiny church were open that night for a visiting story teller. The windows dim and the normal pastor aside, a tall lanky fella stood with his guitar under a single florescent light. The audience before him sat in silence under the gray. And so he began to play, to tell his story.

I sat there listening, thinking, watching. Arthur Alligood was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans and wore wide-rimmed glasses. He looked like a red headed David Crowder (for those of you who know who he is). He strummed his guitar with more of a nervous tick than the graceful movements of other more well-known artists. But somehow this quick jerking motion birthed a worthy rhythmic melody to his story, which he sung with awkward facial expressions and painful grimaces.

Had I passed him on the street I would have barely noticed him, just a regular Joe. But Friday night, he had my attention though. I think it was because I realized he wasn’t trying to entertain me, to show me how cool he was or how he had everything together and what it looked like to be the perfect little Christian. Instead he sung songs on the struggles of everyday life, told stories about the difficulties that often accompany following Christ. About temptation and doubt, pain and confusion. It was an hour of confession and of fellowship as this brother shared his heart and admitted he didn’t have the answers, but proclaimed to know the one who does. His voice rang with truth and his story was real, made up of things from the dark places that don’t look good up in lights or sell well in markets of perfection.

Ironically, this collection of songs, this storybook Arthur choose to share with us, called Under the Gray, offered something the best-selling albums of pop-Christianity all to often don’t. Heart. This album, full of reluctant truths, speaks to brothers and sisters on the same journey as Alligood himself and offers comfort to those who also struggle by simply confessing that he struggles too. He had nothing fancy, nothing showy. Just his honesty that the candles seemed to acknowledge with their flickering. When he was through there was no standing ovation and loud cheering. Just a handful of thankful claps and a room full of pondering people (with just a few that were completely oblivious).

I bet God was smiling though, at Arthur’s offering to Him, thankful that someone used music for a reason other than glorifying man and make a profit.

I was smiling too. I bought his album. And I’ve listened to it a couple of times. It is for the more serious listener who wants to be challenged in their faith instead of having their shallow understanding of what this life is about exalted and their ego stroked by an emotional high. It a heavy album, some may even call it depressing. And granted the meat of the album, the songs of great substance, often take you deep into dark places. But its there you meet the great mystery of Christ, the one Paul speaks of in Colossians 4, the hope that there is something more than this messed up, sick and twisted world that we live in. Arthur is an awkwardly amazing artist who makes you comfortable with your uncomfortableness and tells you its okay that everything is not okay, that Jesus Christ will sustain you through what you don’t understand and are afraid to admit.

His album probably won’t make him rich or famous; gain him publicity or great notoriety. But it is pleasing to the One who matters and it’s pleasing to people not afraid to search for God in their struggles and find Him in their searching. If you’re searching, here is someone searching with you. Maybe he can help you find.