At the Axis of Blues, Gospel and Rock

When you listen to "We Walk This Road" (Warner Bros.) by Robert Randolph & the Family Band, you'll notice that at six points in the album Mr. Randolph and producer T-Bone Burnett have inserted snippets of scratchy old field recordings by Mitchell's Christian Singers and Blind Willie Johnson. Those recordings struck a chord deep within 31-year-old Mr. Randolph, who plays in the tradition of pedal-steel and lap-steel guitarists in the House of God Church.

"T-Bone said, 'You and I have to connect to these songs,'" Mr. Randolph recounted over lunch. "In the beginning, I didn't know where he was going. But he knew I came out of an all-black gospel church. I listened to Led Zeppelin and Dylan, but I came out of the church."

The cross-pollination of blues, gospel and rock inspired Mr. Randolph's band and some well-chosen guests, and the rousing result is in kinship with the kind of zealous music he made in church. The album's songs reflect the bond: "I Still Belong to Jesus" and "Salvation"; "Traveling Shoes" and "Dry Bones," sparked by traditional field songs; and "Shot of Love," the title track of Bob Dylan's 1981 Christian-themed album. "If I Had My Way" includes biblical references and is sung by Ben Harper. Leon Russell plays piano on "Salvation."

Because it exists at the axis of several types of American music, "We Walk This Road" keeps one foot in the secular world with songs by Prince and John Lennon, among others, all played in Mr. Randolph's ebullient style.

When Mr. Randolph gets going, he's gone: During his recent tour, his aggressive playing broke all four pedal-steel instruments he'd brought along. The audience at his performance late last month at the Bowery Ballroom here was unaware that he switched to a standard Fender Telecaster guitar because he'd damaged his only remaining pedal steel, which was then jury-rigged by a tech so he could finish the show.

The pedal-steel guitar is at the heart of Mr. Randolph's music. With its pedals and levers that change its pitch, it can sound like an organ--which is why its predecessor, the lap-steel guitar, was played in churches where the congregation couldn't afford a keyboard. It can, as you might imagine, sound like a slide guitar, and Mr. Randolph can make it sing a la Sonny Landreth or Warren Haynes. But his biggest influences are the men who performed during church services: early masters, such as Henry Nelson and Willie Eason, and the new generation, including Calvin Cooke, Chuck Campbell and Ted Beard.

It was Mr. Beard who taught him a lesson he never forgot. Mr. Randolph had been a hot-shot player since his teens in West Orange, N.J., with a growing reputation among practitioners of what's known in the House of God Church as "sacred steel." ("You're the man when you're on pedal" is how Mr. Randolph put it to me.) Having begun to spice up his playing with licks he learned from listening to blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, Mr. Randolph was invited to travel to Detroit to play before a congregation that included Mr. Beard.

"I get to the church service and I'm trying to play like Ted Beard," Mr. Randolph said. "Afterwards, he came up to me and he said: 'You bombed the whole service. Nobody wants to hear you sound like me. If you want to move on in life, you take all the information you have and you apply it to your own thing.' That clicked with me when I was making this record."

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