The Annie Moses Band and the spirituality of music

The Annie Moses Band has been tough for the music industry to label. It’s made up of six brothers and sisters, all of whom are classically educated and have top-drawer playing ability. The members of the band are Christians, and all of them play Christian events and in churches. They get their name from their great-grandmother, Annie Moses. I interviewed singer and musician Annie Dupre about the band’s work and what it’s like growing up in a family with such a strong musical legacy. We had this conversation at Merlefest, a bluegrass and Americana Music Festival in Wilkesboro, N.C.

Your family band is not really a contemporary Christian music (CCM) band. You are on a secular label and you play mostly secular venues. Was that an intentional choice? No, it was kind of God sticking us in a funny spot. … We found that we were stylistically very much outside of the normal CCM sound. We weren’t a male vocal rock band, and that meant that the normal career path for the typical CCM artist just didn’t apply to us. A lot of our musical journey has kind of been hacking up our trail through the wilderness so to speak. That’s given us some amazing opportunities to exist as Christians in spaces that you don’t normally see Christians occupying.

You’ve done stuff for PBS on a huge, even global platform. How did that come about? Our first PBS special came out about five years ago as a Christmas special. It was a God thing. We had a gentleman in Florida who has a production company that works with PBS. He approached us after seeing one of our concert performances on NRB. He was awake like at 3 in the morning and he saw it. He thought our music would be really well received on PBS, and it has been.

Your parents are still writing a lot of your songs and doing some of the arranging, is that correct? Our dad, Bill Wolaver, is a prolific arranger and orchestrator and still very much at the hub of that. Our mother, Robin, still writes a lot. She is still very musically creative and invested, but she’s off the road right now and she oversees our nonprofit called the Annie Moses Foundation. She does a lot of writing and speaking. She is the author of a book called The Song of Annie Moses. She is very much a leader in helping other families navigate the artistic development of their children.

I’m fond of quoting the musicologist and philosopher Damon of Athens who said, “Give me the songs of a people and I care not who writes its laws.” That’s absolutely the case. The arts are the undeclared sermons of our culture. Every song, every movie that we go see, all the shows we watch on television—those are all representative of a worldview and an understanding of family, an understanding of what it means to love. Right now, every core principle is being shaken. We need a new generation of communicators. For my parents, when we were growing up, it wasn’t so important that we were musicians. They wanted us to have the chops [so] if we wanted to go into music we could. Their biggest thing was this: They wanted us to be communicators because to be a communicator for the kingdom is to be a powerful tool for God.

What is special about being in a band with your brothers and sisters? I think music fundamentally is an expression of love. I think love always ends in creation. That’s true in romantic love as well. You get married and you have children. There is the natural outflow with love multiplying. With our family, it’s a powerful thing when your mother wakes up everyday with you and, in a million unspoken ways, she says, “Your talent is worth my time, my energy, my resources. There is greatness inside of you and I’m here to help you find it.” When that happens, every day you are whole growing up. You start to feel the wind of success and the wind of the victories and facing the challenges that come with ongoing levels. It’s just a powerful thing. It bonds you together in an amazing way. My mother always says that music for us was a love language, and I think that’s very true. I think that became the fuel that allowed us to make music as a family.

How would you advise parents to approach music with their children? There are two ways of looking at music. In the spiritual sense, music is a spiritual discipline. In America, we look at music as like the reverse of sports: “I have one kid that’s athletic, and I have one kid that’s musical. I’ll put one in soccer and I’ll put the other one in piano or something.” Biblically speaking, that is not the way it works. Singing, praise, music, all of those things, those are on the same level as spiritual disciplines like prayer. It’s not a game like football. In my mind, if you are a believer, you have an artistic voice and you should work to have a form of expression for that, every time.

God is a creator, we are created in His image. We are created to be creators, right? Exactly. It should be no surprise to us, for instance, in public schools that we don’t recognize a creator anymore, so we’ll slash all of our creative programs because we are not going to be creative anymore. Those two things are very interconnected. Part of it is just the spiritual discipline. The other part of it is the fact that it just prepares your child for everything else that they are going to do in life. It also requires of the parent that they be focused and committed themselves. When your child is 5, they don’t learn too much on their own.

For music, the window of opportunity is from the age of 3 to 12. Your child can learn music after the age of 12, but [without] all of the benefits to their cognitive skills—coordinating the left and right sides of their brain and creating better motor skills and dexterity and all the discipline parts. All those studies that you’ve heard about music making your child brilliant only apply if they study music from the age of 3 to 12. If they do, it is miraculous what it does in the life of your child.

Listen to Warren Smith’s complete conversation with Annie Dupre on the May 27, 2016 episode of Listening In.