Theologizing with Larkin Poe, 10 years after Reskinned

Lately as an amateur guitarist/professional theologian, I’ve been getting into the music of Larkin Poe, a Grammy Award-winning blues rock band led by guitar-playing sisters Rebecca and Megan Lovell from rural Northwest Georgia who named their band after their great-great-great-great grandfather, a cousin of Edgar Allan Poe.

I came for what I’d read about their electric guitar prowess, instantly liked their sound and soon discovered in their catalog much that serves as grist for theological reflection, in a Southern Gothic sort of way.

I’d been seeing mentions of the Lovell sisters in online guitar forums I’d followed since taking up electric guitar five years ago, and soon Larkin Poe concert clip reels began showing up in my Instagram feed. In late April, I decided a drive through Georgia for a conference was the right occasion for a listen through their discography. By the end of my return drive, I’d decided I was ready to declare myself a fan and see them play live — and was disappointed to discover they’d just had a show in nearby Charlotte, where my wife serves as a minister, the evening before my departure for Decatur.

Some background for readers unfamiliar with Larkin Poe: Rebecca and Megan are two of three daughters (third and second, respectively, in the birth order; there is also a younger brother) born to pathologist David and physical therapist Trissa Lovell, who raised and home-schooled them on a farm outside Calhoun, Ga.

Their mother encouraged their early musical formation, insisting they sing in their church choir and take classical violin lessons; I can hear echoes of their violin training in the phrasings of Megan’s lap steel slide soloing.

Their father’s extensive classic rock record collection also shaped their musical inclinations. The title track from their 2022 album Blood Harmony, which won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album, is a tribute to their family of origin’s role in their musical career, with Trissa contributing backing vocals to the studio recording of that song.

Guitar virtuosity continues to be a family affair, as the sisters each are married to Grammy-recognized professional guitarists — Rebecca to Tyler Bryant, guitarist and lead vocalist for his band Tyler Bryant and the Shakedown, and Megan to Mike Seal, guitarist for The Jerry Douglas Band.

When Megan was 13 and Rebecca 11, the family went to the MerleFest music festival in Wilkesboro, N.C., where the girls fell in love with bluegrass and soon thereafter abandoned their violin lessons. With their elder sister Jessica on fiddle, in 2005 they formed The Lovell Sisters bluegrass band.

Megan took up the dobro, a resonator guitar she played as a slide guitar, and Rebecca embraced the mandolin — becoming so quickly proficient at it that in 2006 at the age of 15, she won first prize in the MerleFest mandolin competition as the first woman and youngest person ever to do so. (Many readers of Baptist News Global will be interested to learn that Jessica attended Shorter College, a Baptist-affiliated university in Rome, Ga.)

A 2005 radio appearance on A Prairie Home Companion as winners of the Prairie Home National Teen Talent Competition led to a record contract and touring career as teenage musicians, but they disbanded at the end of 2009 following Jessica’s engagement to be married and decision to continue her education.

By the following April Rebecca and Megan were back at MerleFest, but as Larkin Poe, hawking their first EP, Spring. Between then and the release of their first LP in 2014, they worked on electrifying their sound in support of the roots rock/blues rock direction they’d decided to take their new band, with Rebecca applying her mandolin chops to electric guitar and Megan trading the dobro for electric lap steel guitar — but played standing up via a strap and frame she engineered — as the band’s “Slide Queen.”

I enjoyed each of the eight Larkin Poe studio albums that soundtracked my April drive through Georgia, from their 2014 debut Kin through 2025’s Bloom. But I’ve retained a special fondness for their sophomore 2016 release Reskinned, which marked its tenth anniversary this year.

Six years after the genesis of Larkin Poe and two years before Bob Seger’s discovery of their cover of Son House’s song “Preachin’ Blues” — for which I have great appreciation as a Baptist preacher myself — led to a run of shows as Seger’s opening act that brought them to the attention of a wider audience, they issued Reskinned as a re-working of Kin that replaced five of the tracks on the latter album with five new songs.

Kin, by the way, supplied me with an illustration for a sermon on Trinitarian themes in a Lectionary Gospel lesson from John 17 I preached a few weeks after discovering Larkin Poe. The prayer of Jesus in that text includes, “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us. … I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.”

The chorus of Kin’s penultimate track, “We Intertwine,” has these lyrics:

And when my heart can beat no more
I hope I’d die for all the good that’s left in this world
And when my body gives out, I —
I hope you find out just what this whole life was for
You and me, us and we, her and I, and him and she
Yours and mine, thou and thine, and all the ways we intertwine

The song helped me explain the doctrine of the Trinity not as an unsolvable math problem, but as the good news of what happens when we participate in the life of the God whose life is marked by intertwining mutual relationally. (The Trinity informs Larkin Poe’s lyrical vocabulary with a rather different application in “Freedom” on their 2017 album, Peach.)

After the service, I discovered a couple who were visiting their parents/in-laws in the congregation are Larkin Poe fans. I guessed they were in their late 60s or early 70s —  illustrating the intergenerational appeal of the music of these women born in 1989 and 1991.

Hearing the first few songs of Reskinned after the conclusion of Kin with “We Intertwine” and “Overachiever” is not unlike what U2 fans experienced in 1991 when their ears most recently conditioned by The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum took in Achtung Baby’s lead single “The Fly,” which Bono famously described as “the sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree.” The distorted vocals and blistering guitar riffs of Reskinned’s first two tracks —  “Sucker Puncher” and “Trouble in Mind” — have the effect of announcing in all caps “WE ARE NOT THE LOVELL SISTERS BLUEGRASS BAND” to anyone who missed that takeaway from Kin.

The third track, “Don’t” — the hardest rocker of the songs retained from Kin — underscores the fact that the roots of the trajectory toward what the band would become already were present on the earlier album. But then the next two new songs — “When God Closes a Door” and “P.R.O.B.L.E.M.” —  firmly establish the grittier guitar rock sound that would mark their future output as a roots rock/blues rock powerhouse.

It was “When God Closes a Door” that got me to thinking theologically in the midst of my guitarist’s reverie. When the title displayed on the Apple Music screen, I wondered what Larkin Poe might do with the Christian platitude “when God closes a door, he opens a window,” which I find theologically misguided and pastorally unhelpful. And holy cow, did they take it in an unanticipated direction.

It starts out:

Turn the TV on
Let’s watch a good show
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
See how the gospel goes

Rebecca called it a “satirical song” in introducing early live performances, but embedded in the satire is some serious theologizing about how the gospel seems to be going in a world in which “there’s lots of bad guys.” Surely the “bad guys” are the ones who aren’t on the side of powerful Jesus. And surely being on Team Jesus means when doors close, God opens a window leading to something even more wonderful for people who aren’t the “bad guys.”

But the chorus answers:

When God closes a door
God leads you up the stairs
Leave your earthly cares
On the second floor
Then God cracks a couple of skulls
God cracks a couple more
His plate is full on the second floor

Rebecca wrote the song one cold winter day huddled beneath blankets in an unheated Atlanta apartment during the band’s starving artist phase. Upon hearing her account of the song’s composition, I wondered — was the apartment on the second floor?

What one encounters on the second floor imagined by the song forces a reckoning with unexamined beliefs. There we’re confronted with the harm done by religion. We become aware of the religious motivations for so much violence, inspired by religious texts that include Jewish and Christian scriptural narratives of a God who does seem now and then to go around cracking skulls. The song’s bridge alludes to the January 2015 Islamist terror attacks in the Paris region that began with the slaying of the editorial staff of the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo during their weekly meeting in their newsroom — on the building’s second floor. (Oh!) The bridge ends with the plea, before the final chorus:

Where my guide?
Where my guide?
Where my guide?
On the second floor

In live performances of the song, sometimes in an extended outro Rebecca works in a snippet of the Bob Marley song “I Shot the Sheriff” covered by Eric Clapton — more second-floor violence. But sometimes she also sings, “Have a little talk with God, tell him what you need,” repeated with the alteration, “Have a little talk with God, tell her what you need, on the second floor.”

Naming God with feminine as well as masculine pronouns is theologically significant enough (a concept developed further in “If God Is a Woman,” Bloom, 2025). But the movement from the platitude echoed in the song’s title through the disorienting awareness of religious violence encountered on the second floor to the encouragement to tell God what we need in prayer in the live outro reminds me of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s characterization of a spiritual journey that moves from a “first naïvité” through an experience of critical reexamination to a postcritical “second naïvité” that once again can imagine the world from the perspective of faith, but a mature faith that cannot return to the simple, literalistic faith of the first naïvité.

The prominent place of Christian religious imagery throughout Larkin Poe’s music can be understood in terms of Ricouer’s second naïvité. This is manifested in the way Larkin Poe comfortably inhabits the Southern Gothic theological imagination of Flannery O’Connor’s “Christ-haunted South,” in which both the Good Lord and the evil powers seek people’s souls. It’s an imagination in which not only may a Faustian bargain with the devil at a Mississippi crossroads be responsible for blues guitar virtuosity (“Mississippi,” Venom & Faith, 2018), but the power of the Holy Spirit flowing from fingers to guitar frets may make the music Larkin Poe loves to play a testimony to God (“Holy Ghost Fire,” Self Made Man, 2020).

These relatives of Southern Gothic literary fountainhead Edgar Allan Poe follow his precedent in attending to the reality of decay and death. “Good and Gone” (Venom & Faith) and “Lips as Cold as Diamond” (Blood Harmony), along with longtime fan favorite “Mad as a Hatter” (which finally found a home on the live concert album Paint the Roses, 2021), are expressions of the Southern Gothic appropriation of a trope from classical philosophy and the Medieval Christian tradition, memento mori — “remember that you will die” — a Latin phrase Rebecca has tattooed on her strumming forearm.

In the midst of this sober recognition, one can “sing Hallelujah, anyway” when other words for prayer are hard to find (“Ain’t Gonna Cry” and “Good and Gone” on Venom & Faith), a stance enabled by the second naïvité.

But in the tradition of the Southern Gothic de-romanticization of the civil religion of the South, Larkin Poe can imagine a rapacious USA taking “little Jesus on the dashboard” on a careening joyride in “Honey Honey,” the track that supplies the title for the album Venom & Faith in the lyric “by the altar with the rattlesnake / the venom and the faith” (suggestive of the Gadsden flag).

While the 2018 release of the album tempts one to connect the song to then-current developments in American political and religious life, the band already was performing it live in 2015. Yet it seems prescient, and the groove Rebecca lays down with the upright string bass she plays for the song and Megan’s eerie surf guitar-esque lap steel glissandos together evoke the dread of an impending crash down the road.

The critical reexamination of religion in “When God Closes a Door” resurfaces five tracks later on Reskinned in the song “Blunt.” It has some questions, starting with one for humanity:

From Tonka trucks to nukes
What happened to us?

But God bears the brunt of the song’s interrogation:

“Your sins are myriad”
So says our God
Well, God, if you’re serious
You botched the job
If you knew your chisel was blunt
Why did you make so many of us?

Some Christians might be offended by such questioning, but it’s downright biblical, in the tradition of the psalms of lament that call God to account for the suffering and injustice that mark God’s world.

There’s another question for God:

Was it you who made the shape up in the garden?
Up in the garden, Lord?

This question is framed with theological sophistication. “Up in the garden” rather than “back in the garden” conceptualizes the divine work of creation from the standpoint of a Ricouerian second naïvité rather than a literalistic first naïvité.

“Blunt” doesn’t merely pose critical questions to God in light of the current state of God’s world. Its bridge gestures toward what can be done about it:

Baby, better get your tools
Got a lot of work to do

This is remarkably similar to Christian philosopher John K. Roth’s essay in the book Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy proposing a theodicy (a grappling with the tension between affirmations of the goodness and omnipotence of God on the one hand and the existence of evil and suffering in God’s world on the other hand) that emphasizes protest as the proper response to the problem of evil and suffering rather than the offering of a rationally satisfying philosophical solution to the problem. Roth took his cue from the biblical psalms of lament, in which the protest to God that things should not be this way becomes the impetus for the protester to act on this protest by working to overcome injustice and alleviate suffering.

In other words, “Baby, better get your tools / Got a lot of work to do.” Or in the words of Larkin Poe’s cover of Blind Willie Johnson’s “God Moves on the Water” (Self Made Man) that reckons with God’s responsibility for various disasters, “Come together, it’s the only way / I’m reaching out, you gotta take my hand.”

Among the songs that Reskinned retains from Kin, I especially appreciate “Don’t” and its theme of women’s agency as a theologian informed by feminist theology who is married to a woman ordained to the Baptist ministry amid patriarchal resistance to women serving as pastors. This is a theme articulated also by “Wanted Woman / AC/DC” (Peach), “She’s a Self Made Man” (Self Made Man), “If God Is a Woman” and Pearls (Bloom).

It’s a theme Rebecca and Megan have fully embodied: In a male-dominated industry, they own their own record label (Tricki-Woo Records, named after a dog in the James Herriot books they enjoyed reading while growing up) and they self-produce their albums, retaining control over some of the most important decisions to be made about their own art.

“Stubborn Love,” a song that likewise made its first appearance on Kin, functions on Reskinned as a recommitment of the sisters to being “a two-for-one deal,” no matter how one or the other may feel at a particular moment, even after “every time we fight in a hotel room.” It reminds me of the rituals of the renewal of a church covenant, the renewal of baptismal vows, and the renewal of marriage vows. Like monastic communities, the covenanted communities that are churches, marriages and even rock bands all benefit from the practice of stability, the hard work of staying in relationship with one another over time that helps the parties to the relationship do something creative together that blesses the world.

The blues genre embraced by Larkin Poe has a built-in eschatological framework. Theologian James Cone’s book The Spirituals and the Blues characterized the blues as “secular spirituals” that give expression to the Christian perspective on the world that is and the world that ought to be, naming the suffering of the present for what it is but holding on to the hope that things can be different.

On the one hand, in the words of “Bluephoria” (Bloom), “this rose-tinted workaround ain’t workin’ for me no more.” But on the other hand, the “rage in the mirror looking back at me” in “Look Away” (Peach) can rise toward the major key resolution at the end of the song with church-like organ chords underneath Megan’s yearningly hopeful slide outro. Rebecca’s Instagram byline puts it like this: “One must encounter the dark to see the light.”

As a theologian especially interested in ecumenical ecclesiology, I was curious about the particular sort of church background that contributed to the formation of Rebecca and Megan for their theologizing on Reskinned and beyond. They’ve not been publicly specific about it, but when I heard them sing the 18th century American hymn “When Jesus Wept, the Falling Tear” as one of the songs they recalled singing together in church as children during Ari Shapiro’s 2014 NPR interview of them shortly after the release of Kin, I thought that might supply a clue. Alas, the author of the hymn’s text had loose Episcopal and Unitarian connections, the tune’s composer was similarly loosely connected with Congregationalism, and the hymn’s publication in 24 different hymnals with diverse denominational connections offers no suggestion of which denomination’s hymnal might have been used in their childhood church.

But a little online exploration led to the discovery of extensive Seventh-day Adventist connections in the family. All four grandparents, including “the father of my father” referenced in “Mad as a Hatter,” are buried in a Seventh-day Adventist cemetery in Collegedale, Tenn., and seem to have been associated with Seventh-day Adventist churches. Collegedale is home to Southern Adventist University (formerly Southern Missionary College), which members of at least two generations of the family of Rebecca and Megan attended.

And it turns out that their great-grandfather was Walter Specht, a Seventh-day Adventist minister and New Testament scholar who earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and served as a professor of New Testament at La Sierra College, a Seventh-day Adventist institution in Riverside, Calif., and the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary in Berrien Springs, Mich.

It seems that shaking the family tree shakes out sources not only of blood harmony and blood Southern Gothic sensibility, but also of blood theologizing.

While the Seventh-day Adventist Church is known for its conservative theology, literal approach to biblical interpretation, Saturday worship and distinctive premillennial (but not dispensational) eschatology (but don’t read too much into Larkin Poe’s cover of “John the Revelator” in that connection), in the present context it’s worth noting that Seventh-day Adventists are historic opponents of Christian bnationalism. They often have collaborated with Americans United for Separation of Church and State and Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty in filing amicus briefs in court cases to defend the separation of church and state. And while not members of the World Council of Churches, Seventh-day Adventists have been represented ecumenically in the work of WCC commissions.

Rebecca and Megan Lovell are engaging in theology in their musical art, and this theologizing has a liturgical dimension in their live shows. Rebecca said in an interview, “When you are on stage and … really connect with people in a crowd and the souls intertwine for a minute, and everyone’s singing the same words, it’s sort of like a weird form of prayer — like it’s a rock-and-roll prayer.”

This amateur guitarist/professional theologian who is now a Larkin Poe fan is looking forward to sharing in this rock-and-roll prayer with Larkin Poe and fellow fans sometime in the near future. Come back to North Carolina soon, Rebecca and Megan!

 

Find a playlist of songs mentioned in this article: Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube

 

Steven R. Harmon serves as professor of historical theology at Gardner-Webb University School of Divinity in Boiling Springs, N.C. His most recent book is Encountering Pope Leo XIV: Baptist Reflections on the Beginning of a Pontificate.