Japanese Cheese

Billy Adams

Japanese Cheese

Cannonball Records CB-101
(Another Sound On The Ball)
Fort Oglethorpe, GA 30742

[1982]

Yes, this is Billy Adams, of "Rock, Pretty Mama" fame, who left the rock 'n' roll arena in 1964 to pursue a career as a singing evangelist.

According to UPI News, Sept. 23 1982

....Adams, a 1950s singer-songwriter who became a born-again evangelist, reached the high moment of his two-week revival in this small town north of Columbia, Nort Carolina, with a record-crunching and book-burning.

More than 200 members of the Holiness Pentecostal Church -- many of them children -- turned out to learn from Adams that 'Rock has a heavy, incessant demonic beat. It's the same beat used in the rites of primitive tribes.'

'At the base of the brain there's a small gland called the pituitary gland,' he said. 'The rock beat beats on this gland. Rock music has a direct effect on the pituitary gland.
'It distorts it and sends too many chemicals into the brain. It causes a complete wipeout of the moral inhibitions.'
 

After his 90-minute sermon, the crowd adjourned to the parking lot to burn books, T-shirts and cassette recordings he said were inspired by the devil. A plan to heap rock 'n' roll and country music records into a pile and burn them in a bonfire was aborted. Instead, the albums were smashed with sledgehammers.

Adams noted that RCA records in New York had warned that burning records would release deadly polyvinyl chloride gas.  'RCA came out and said there's poison gas in these records,' he cried. 'Well, we knew that, that's why we're going to break them and burn everything else.'

He agreed that some critics would call his career as a recording artist hypocritical, given his attacks on rock music. "You'll have a few who'll say, 'Aha, look what he's done,' " Adams said. "But my big fight with rock music was when they went beyond selling records and filled it with drugs, sex, hidden messages and Satanic things."

Rock, Pretty Mama (live)

Born in Redbush, Ky., on March 6, 1940, Mr. Adams was one of 14 children and the son of a coal miner who worked in the Van Lear coal mine, the same place that Loretta Lynn sings about in “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”

Other songs he recorded in the late ’50s include “You Heard Me Knocking,” “True Love Will Come Your Way” and “You Gotta Have a Duck Tail.”
 

He was inspired to write “Rock, Pretty Mama” listening to the sound of trains near his home.

Billy Adams died March 30, 2019 in Westmoreland, Tenn. He was 79.