Opinion

Joy’s Open Secret was revealed 60 years ago

Ian Boughton remembers a Christian song that hit the popular music charts 60 years ago, and explains how that triggered a revolution in worship music.

As I recently watched a church worship group enthusiastically attacking one of the classic hymns, a piece of music trivia stirred itself in the back of my brain.  Back at home, I scrabbled for my Guinness Book of Hit Singles to confirm it… and yes, I was right!
 
It was in late February 1964 that a young Salvation Army officer, Joy Webb, pictured above, took her band the Joystrings into the pop charts with her song ‘It’s an Open Secret’.  That was a landmark – we have now come exactly sixty years since CCM, ‘Contemporary Christian Music’, made its breakthrough to the general public.
 
Effectively, Joy kick-started the CCM movement.  She wrote Christian songs which had recognisable aspects of contemporary music in them, and in this, she was far ahead of everyone – Dave Bilbrough didn’t write his classic ‘Abba Father’ for another ten years, Graham Kendrick didn’t produce ‘Shine Jesus Shine’ for another ten years after that, and Matt Redman was a good decade later still.  She was well before Vineyard, Hillsong, and all the modern-day Christian music publishers.
 
When I was a writer for Christian and worship magazines, I once had the privilege of sitting down for coffee with Joy, who by then already had the Army title ‘retired major’.    
 
True to her name, Joy was a delightfully good-humoured lady, and laughed at the memory of how she became famous: the top man of the Salvation Army had reacted to a press reporter’s question about the rise of beat groups with the unguarded response that ‘if we have to take our message out there with electric guitars, that’s what we’ll do’.  “Well, the media jumped on that, and wanted to see it happen!” Joy recalled.
 
The BBC immediately demanded that the Army’s beat group appear on their evening programme Tonight; a panicked appeal through Army headquarters revealed a young Joy who had a guitar and wrote songs, she was ordered to collect a few colleagues together and rehearse her song, they performed on the programme that night, became instant stars, and Joy went on to a fine song-writing career, her name revered to this day in Army circles.
 
The remarkable thing is that her first hit was a ‘song’ – it wasn’t a formal church-speak hymn, which was all Christian writers could come up with before then.  On that day sixty years ago, she took us into a new era of worship music.
 
“The whole thing came as a complete shock to the church in this country,” Joy remembered with a giggle. And look what happened after that!
 
At the very same table where I had spoken with Joy, Dave Bilbrough, right, later told me how, in the mid-70s, he and several other aspiring Christian songwriters had sat around, nervously trying out their new songs on each other.
 
Just this week I reminded him of that. He recalled: “we had been encouraged by our leadership to articulate the key themes that we as a church were focusing on at the time. There was a number of us writing, and some of the songs lasted a week or two, but some lasted for years and made it into the songbooks.
 
“One of those pieces was my ‘Abba Father’; Bob Gilman played us ‘Bind Us Together’, which became very popular, and John Kennett wrote, ‘Praise Him on the Trumpet, the Psaltery and Harp’, a really good up-tempo song that lasted quite a few years… Roy Castle even recorded an instrumental version. Another of us was Dave Bryant who wrote ‘Jesus, take me as I am’, a great song still being sung.”
 
Joy always admired Christian writers who are prepared to do what she had done, in taking Christian music in plain language to the real world. She said, “It’s a lot easier to sing to Christians in a church hall than it is in a nightclub, but it’s in a Salvationist’s blood to get out into the world. So the first place we played was a pub in Camberwell, and then we did the Soho clubs... I wouldn’t have gone to the Playboy club by choice, but the Army sent us there, and we lost all our fear at the bunny club!
 
“So I say to Christian bands: get out there, find the rock venues, but make sure you’re good – God doesn’t need to be shot down just because you aren’t good enough.”
 
It was thirty years after the Joystrings that Matt Redman hit the wider world, becoming the first contemporary Christian songwriter to have teenage girl appeal.  In an interview at the time, he told me he was enthusiastic about individual worship groups being encouraged to write their own songs, just as happened to Bilbrough. 
“There is” he remarked, “a special value in songs which come out of the experience of your own congregation.”
 
Among worship leaders in North Norfolk who were inspired by Joy’s breakthrough is Rev. Ron Skivington, right, pastor at Stalham Baptist Church, a man who has been seen leading his services while wearing a tie with a guitar motif.
 
“I grew up in a church using the old green Baptist hymnal, where taking in my guitar was seen as on the outer edges of what was deemed acceptable! Many of the choruses of the time were simply sung scripture, and now, fewer songs are written the old way.  Here, we use about 75% of CCM against 25% of more traditional hymns, and when I went back to that first church a couple of years ago, I found they too were now heavily into newer music. I have always been sure that God is always been ready to move on, too.”
 
Joy would have approved of that. She had told me: “Many of our youngsters are growing up in an entirely clap-happy New Testament church. But we need more than just praise songs and hands waving in the air - we need inspirational songs, we need doctrine songs, and we need meditational songs. Back in the 60s, all the kids were into the protest-song movement, which suited me very well... and what we need in the church today is more protest songs!”
 
And there we have it. Thirty years apart from the breakthrough of CCM, star writers across the generations, Dave Bilbrough, Matt Redman and Major Joy, all in perfect agreement about the value of contemporary Christian songwriting by members of congregations.
 
There is nothing else for it – tell your worship group to pick up pens and guitars, and start writing songs!

Footnote: Connie Roberts from Norwich has been in touch to say that The Joystrings performed on the steps of St.Pauls Cathedral at the beginning of Christian Aid Week in May 1964. She writes, "I was amazed to read about the connection with the Joystrings group. My late husband, David Roberts, and a Methodist friend of his, Brian Frost, arranged this event as Brian was the Christian Aid organiser at the time. It certainly enhanced the profile of the week, and takings for the cause improved greatly. My husband was connected with Christian Aid for very many years after we moved to Norwich."

Retired-Major Joy Webb was, as the Salvation Army has it, ‘promoted to glory’ in October at the age of 91. Her picture, above, is courtesy of the Salvation Army.

The photo of Dave Bilbrough is courtesy of Dave's website and is used with permission.
 
The photo of Ron Skivington is courtesy of Ian Boughton.
 

Ian Boughton is a musician and author and retired journalist who lives in Dilham in Norfolk. 

The views carried here are those of the author, not of Network Norfolk, and are intended to stimulate constructive and good-natured debate between website users. 

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