As I continue to make my way at a snail’s pace through Clinton Heylin’s Can You Feel the Silence,1I find myself wondering which biographical details might be important. For instance, Heylin makes much of the fact that Van Morrison’s father was an atheist, while his mother was (at least for a time) a Jehovah’s Witness, and points out that the same was true of Patti Smith (whose first well-known song was a cover of “Gloria”).
A big book could be written (maybe one has, I’m not sure) on the intersection between the Witnesses and popular music. Michael Jackson was brought into the church as a child and left it as an adult, while Prince was converted by Mighty Titan of Bass Larry Graham in the early 2000s and stayed in for the rest of his life. (Donald “Childish Gambino” Glover, Thelonious Monk, and metal legend Dave Mustaine were also raised as Witnesses.) Van Morrison attended meetings with his mom and even wrote a song about it, 1978’s “Kingdom Hall”:
In this portrayal the meetings sound fun, almost like services at a Black gospel church:
We can clear inhibition away
All our inhibitions
Throw them away
And when we dance like this
We will dance like we’ve never before
Oh, they were swingin’
Down at Kingdom Hall
Oh, bells were ringin’
Down at the Kingdom Hall
A choir was singin’
Down at the Kingdom Hall
One wonders about the ethnic makeup of that crowd. In the USA, according to Pew Research,
Jehovah’s Witnesses are among the most racially and ethnically diverse religious groups in America. No more than four-in-ten members of the group belong to any one racial and ethnic background: 36% are white, 32% are Hispanic, 27% are black and 6% are another race or mixed race.
And also all of the musicians I named above are African-American (except for Dave Mustaine, who is extremely white).
There’s no way of knowing what it might have been like in Belfast. But in any case, the meetings seem to have been an early exposure of young Morrison to the kind of religious ecstasy in music that would inform a lot of his work. I think this qualifies as important, and from here one could continue down the deep rabbit hole that is the strange and fascinating world of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Take a spin, if you wish, through the tangled, almost painfully balanced Wikipedia coverage thereof; but that’s not how I choose to spend my Sunday. Over and out for now.
When I was about 9 years old my sisters and I attended attended a Kingdom Hall for a summer, it didn’t take.
What was the music like?
1/30/2026
In the 70s & 80s & 90s the “Kingdom Songs” sung at the “Kingdom Hall were DIRGES. Slow, droll & contained no joy, whatsoever. They DID contsin a lot of preaching & listing of conzequences IF YOU DONT OBEY! JWs sing only songs written by the higher uos at the Watchtower Socirty. JWs believe they are the only TRUE religion on the planet, believe they are the ONLY true & accurate form of Christianity & that only they have the proper inside channels to God. As a result, they dont believe in any form of ecumenism & refuse to sing any gospel songs, any standard Catholic or Protestant hymns, even those that are hundreds of years old, avoid Gregorian chants like the plague & dont sing songs written by the “Born Agains” or Evangelicals (kumbaya-like acoustic folk rock) & also wont listen to “Christian Rock.” I’m describing JW music tastes & KH sounds in the 70s-90s. Van Morrison went to the KH in the 50s! I’m very familiar with the Pop music in the 50s before the birth of Rock n Roll in 1954! Drab, droll, boring & uninovative. (“How Much Is That Doggy In The Window”, “High Hopes”, OMG! 😱) If “worldly” music was like that, I can only imagine the “Kingdom Songs” from the “Kingdom Book” (or whatever it was called in the 50s. JWs are VERY stiff & conservative, so I cant envision a KH meeting the way Van Morrison described it – in the 50s or in 2026 – with ppl jumping up & down for joy. That type of exuberant worship is found elsewhere! Christian song has always been a part of the Church in the African-American community for the last 150 yrs, or so, usually Baptist. Note: European-American & African-American Gospel music are very different from each other. Catholics didnt begin to sing for joy until the 80s. So, in the worldwide conservative 50s & in the even more conservative all “white”” JW Kingdom Halls in Northern Ireland, I wonder if Morrison wasnt just using “poetic license” to describe a JW mź– I forgot to mention that from at least the late 80s on to right now, bc they have little liturgical structure, many low church Protestant services are filled with spontaneous singing, as often as every 15 minutes. While the KH meetings have no liturgy (bc they believe it to be Satanic, evil & pagan), they are very rigid & structured. From my deduction from aall the changes made within the cult since the 90s, I will guess that there is LESS singing now than in the 80s & 50s. I will conjecture that there is now just an opening song, a song in between the 2 now shortened Sunday meetings & a closing song. Only 4 songs. That’s it.
NOTE: Prince was so in love with his god & the JW faith that he wrote a massive amount of “Kindom Songs” either in the late 90s or the early aughts. He gifted them to the WTS. Instead of seeing any spiritual value in them, the WTS rejected ALL of the songs & then DESTROYED the entire Prince repetoire that he wrote as a gift & with deep love. I have no idea if he was hurt or accepted the decision & rejection like good little soldier boy publisher. 💔 I say that it had to deeply hurt. All that work, all those hours – 100% unappreciated!. I wouldve been verty angry & deeply hurt.