Our Lord God loves and deserves our praise (1 Peter 2:9). We can directly praise Him via conversations, prayer, poetry, and proclaiming His Word. One way to praise God is through music that expresses our praise in worship—writing lyrics based on Scripture and then worshipping Him through song. God has used some Christian musicians to stimulate great changes in worship music. Barry McGuire is one of these change agents.
How Did Barry McGuire Become a Musician?
Barry McGuire was born in 1935 in Oklahoma City but moved to Los Angeles as a child with his mother after his parents divorced. He recalls one pivotal moment in those early years:
“When I was growing up, I was about seven years old, and my grandmother said to me, “Barry, when you grow up, you’re going to know the truth, and the truth is going to set you free.”
Barry thought he was searching for the truth, but the Truth would find him.
During the late 1950s, McGuire discovered LA musicians performing folk music and thought it looked fun. In 1960, he bought his first guitar, and within a week, he’d learned some rudimentary chords. At that time, he never dreamed anyone would ever pay him to play music.
His first gig was coincidental; he stopped in a bar where he sang along to a song he knew. Bill, the piano player, invited him to sing and play his guitar with him. That evening led to an invitation to play with Bill at a private event the same night. A partygoer owned a bar and needed a sub a few nights later, and Barry got his first paying gig. McGuire said it was like “going to a party and they pay you.”
From there, McGuire moved into the limelight, cut his first record, and played venues like the famed Troubadour Club. Eventually, Randy Sparks introduced him to the folk group The New Christy Minstrels. They received so much renown Andy Williams had them on his variety show. McGuire recalled, “We wound up doing seventy-five Andy Williams shows.”
Over the next few years, McGuire would connect with many more musicians, most famously The Mamas and the Papas—their hit song “California Dreamin’” initially appeared on his album This Precious Time. He also experimented with acting, appearing in the movies The President’s Analyst and Werewolves on Wheels.
However, all was not right.
How Did Barry McGuire Become a Christian?
McGuire shares his testimony on his website and in an interview posted on GodTube. He describes how The New Christy Minstrels had given him an amount of “fame and notoriety and money, and artistic expression.” However, he said there was “no fulfillment in that.”
After leaving the Christys in 1965, McGuire went “in search of truth.” Initially, he experimented with LSD and other psychedelic drugs but found it unsatisfying.
A turning point came when he “got hold of a little paperback book called Good News for Modern Man, and I didn’t know what it was, I picked it up and on the first page it says, ‘the New Testament in modern English.’” Disappointed, he said, “Oh man, this is those Jesus Freaks, they’re disguising the Bible! Who wants that? And I threw it on the floor.” A few days after, he picked up the book and thought, “What is this Jesus all about?”
He soon stopped looking at the flaws he imagined Christians and their preachers to have. Instead, He looked at Jesus and put what he learned about Jesus “to the test.” What he discovered surprised him.
“Just through my own life experiences, everything Jesus said [was] true … And I thought, this is the answer I’ve been looking for all these years. This is the answer to all our political problems, all our racial problems, everything that’s wrong with society. I finally came down to a decision that I had to make. What am I going to do with this piece of truth? Am I really a truth seeker or a self-seeker?”
In the interview, McGuire then quotes John 8:32, “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” To him, the whole sixties hippie movement was about freedom. He then pondered this question, “What is the ultimate freedom? The closer I get to the fullness of truth, the freer I’m gonna be.”
A video of McGuire performing after he became a Christian in 1971 displays his obvious joy as he sings “Happy Road.” As he says, “If you love the Lord, it’s gonna bleed out of you.”
In the same video, McGuire says his favorite Scripture is Psalm 75:6-7: “For not from the east or from the west and not from the wilderness comes lifting up, but it is God who executes judgment, putting down one and lifting up another.”
What Makes Barry McGuire a Christian Music Pioneer?
McGuire began his career as a protest singer railing against social, racial, and political injustice—most famously recording a rendition of P. F. Sloan’s “Eve of Destruction.” The search for truth and freedom was vital from the start—he observes, “Boy, I sang ‘Eve of Destruction’ lookin' to be free.”
He had acquired fame and some fortune through The New Christy Minstrels and as a solo performer. God used McGuire’s fame for new purposes when he became a believer in the early seventies, with many fans witnessing his new faith.
McGuire moved away from the hippie scene and began writing Gospel music. He became a noted part of the Jesus Movement, a California phenomenon that began at Pastor Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel. Aided by “Jesus hippie” preachers like Lonnie Frisbee, scores of young people became Christians, generating what some have called America’s Third Great Awakening.
Film reviewer Megan Bianco explains that the Jesus Movement led to “Hippies who still wear the same clothes and use the same vernacular, but have abandoned drugs and casual sex for Christianity. The funny thing is, this really did happen by the time the 1960s ended. You might already know this because quite a lot of classic rock musicians eventually became Christians by the late 1970s. Singer-songwriter Barry McGuire, Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman of the Byrds, Richie Furay of Buffalo Springfield, to name a few. This period from the late ‘60s to late ‘70s birthed the term ‘Jesus freak’ and the music subgenre Christian rock.”
The movement led to many new efforts to reach young people, including a new form of Christian music: rock music with Christian lyrics, soon dubbed “Jesus music,” and later Contemporary Christian Music. New recording labels like Myrrh were created to produce and market this music.
McGuire signed with the Myrrh recording label, becoming one of the new genre’s first musicians, alongside pioneers like Randy Stonehill, Larry Norman, and Michael Card. His profile and testimony made him an especially famous member of the “Jesus music” pioneers, his music playing a large part in the new genre becoming popular. He helped a generation feel free to worship the Lord with modern praise songs alongside the much-loved traditional hymns.
10 Barry McGuire Quotes About Faith and Music
From an interview with Richie Unterberger:
1. How he started shifting to Christian morality as he saw the social ills of his time—the deaths of close celebrity friends, the murder of Sharon Tate, and hippie friends stealing from each other. “So gradually, I just adopted the Ten Commandments (laughs). ‘Cause I started to see a reason for ‘em, you know. Why can't we do these things? Because you just can't do those things. I didn't know why. So I threw all the rules away, and everybody starting dying around me, and I wound up desolate and bankrupt, and I said, oh, that's why. So I adapted that into my life.”
2. Musing about why he left Hollywood: “There's a depth and a truth that I found in the teachings of Jesus that really put my life together for me as I applied those truths to my daily choices, attitudes.”
From a Crosswalk.com article by Devlin Donaldson:
3. “We still do ‘Eve of Destruction.’ That song becomes more true each and every year. It’s truer now than it was when I first recorded it.”
4. “What we are doing isnt [sic] so much ministry. We just want to bring some joy and laughter to folks. There are lots of other good ministers out there. We just want to bring wholesome entertainment. And not everything we sing is necessarily Christian.”
From the above GodTube.com video:
5. “… I left the Christys really in search of some answers. And I thought, well, the only way I'm going to find the truth is if I speak the truth.”
6. After reading Good News for the Modern Man, and the struggle of how to follow Jesus without being legalistic:“I wanted to be like Jesus. I thought, ‘Man, this is my guy!’ But I didn't wanna be a Christian, see. I wanted to be like Him, but I didn't wanna be like all them. I thought if I said yes to Jesus I’d have to get a powder blue leisure suit— remember those?—white shoes, ya know, walk around smilin’ a lot. I couldn’t do that.”
7. On his conversion: “That happened in 1971. I fell on my face on the floor of that house in Stone Canyon. I said, 'God, I don't know why, how; if I wake up alive tomorrow I'll follow You wherever You lead me.' And within a week I was on a Greyhound bus out of Hollywood, and I've never looked back, except in awe and wonder at how He revealed Himself to me in my state of mind at that time."
From BarryMcGuire.com:
8. “As we die to ourselves daily, we are moment by moment transformed into the image of Christ, and we can say like Paul, “It is no longer I that live, but Christ that lives in me,” as we will have become ONE with Him.”
9. “Well, I had been struggling. I read the words of Jesus in this little modern translation of His story and the thing that caught my attention was when He said to love God with all your heart, soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself. And I thought, man, if there’s an answer to the ‘Eve of Destruction,’ then that’s it.”
From an interview with John Cody:
10. Reflecting on his experience with an evangelist who didn’t say much but emanated love for people: “I tell people this now; if people don’t see Christ flowing out of our eyes, it doesn’t matter what comes out of our mouth. If they don’t see love—non-judgmental love—flowing out of our eyes, we can just stand there and spout scriptures all day long, and it’s just like tinkling cymbals and clanging brass.”
Best Barry McGuire Albums
These selections give the listener a view of McGuire before and after his conversion.
Barry McGuire and the New Christy Minstrels with Allan Sherman Live (1964)
The Eve of Destruction (1965)
The World’s Last Private Citizen (1968)
Seeds (1973)
Lighten Up (1975)
To the Bride (1982, with 2nd Chapter of Acts and A Band Called David)
After spending much of the 1980s on hiatus to New Zealand with his wife, he recorded more albums, including:
Cosmic Cowboy (1990)
Adventures on Son Mountain (1992)
He also collaborated with Terry Talbot, brother of the equally famous musician John Michael Talbot, on several albums:
When Dinosaurs Walked the Earth (1995)
Ancient Garden (1997)
Frost and Fire (1999)
Some of the Jesus Movement adherents may have followed for a time because it felt good or their friends were doing it. Those who truly embraced Jesus increased the kingdom as God used them as His ambassadors (2 Corinthians 5:20). In Jesus’ parable of the minas, he ends the tale by saying, “I tell you that to everyone who has, more will be given, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Luke 19:10-26). Barry McGuire would probably be the first to tell you his part in the movement was an act of obedience to and love for his Savior; everything is all about and for Him.
Further Reading:
Was Mark Heard Christian Rock's Greatest Songwriter?
What Makes Mylon LeFevre Important to Christian Rock?
10 Things You Should Know about Rich Mullins
Photo Credit: © Getty Images/Nikola Milosevic
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