c. 1998 Religion News Service

ARTHUR, Ill. _ The tunes will sound familiar to listeners from the baby boom generation and forward _ until they hear the song titles:”I Want to Hoe Your Land,””Big Ol’ Horse and Buggy,”and”Barn to Be Wild.” Singing these songs’ lyrics are three men sporting white shirts with black hats, suspenders, and vests and wearing fake beards.

Meet The Electric Amish.”We needed some kind of gimmick, just a visual gag. So we got the idea it might be pretty funny to have Amish guys in a rock band,”band member Dean Metcalf recalls.”We never expected it to go this far.” Gimmick or not, The Electric Amish has sold 50,000 copies of its two albums, which feature rock ‘n’ roll songs and lyrics rewritten to reflect Amish themes. The band spent the summer on a concert tour playing weekend shows throughout Indiana and Illinois, including a stop at the Moultrie-Douglas County Fair in Arthur, Ill., a community which includes 4,000 Amish in a rural settlement dating back to the Civil War.

The presence of so many Amish in the immediate area made the concert at Arthur the most controversial stop in The Electric Amish summer tour.”These folks are wearing white shirts and suspenders and fake beards and they’re going to jump around on stage and say things that no Amish person would say,”said Wilmer Otto, a real estate developer who spent his childhood in a traditional Amish home.

Indeed, when the band opened an evening concert in Arthur recently, they used words not likely to be used in polite Amish company.”Hello, heathens,”shouted Metcalf, in Amish costume and character as Graeber Goodman.

Then, as the music began, Metcalf looked back at the drummer and yelled:”Look at him, he’s playing drums like a crazy Mennonite. For that he will surely burn in hell!” The crowd erupted in applause. And it was no small turnout. Some 2,300 people paid up to $20 each to watch The Electric Amish, virtually packing the band shell at the fairgrounds on the edge of Arthur, whose population is listed as just 2,000.

In the hours before the concert, visitors to Arthur saw the Amish everywhere, driving along rural roads past fields of shoulder-high corn and meeting together for the seemingly ubiquitous late summer family reunions.

The Amish come out of the Anabaptist movement of Europe of the late 17th century. Amish teaching requires simplicity and separation from worldly pursuits forbidding the use of cars, telephones and electricity.

The latter prohibition provides another spoof for The Electric Amish. The band’s concerts feature a man on stage furiously pedaling a stationary bicycle. Band members tell the crowd the man is Yoder, a common Amish name, and that he is generating electricity to run the group’s guitars.”Satire is legal and it’s a wonderful form of bringing perception to people. But I think it must be sensitively done,”said Otto.”It’s a little different when you have someone from outside this community coming in and essentially mocking the Amish.” Eight miles away in slightly larger Arcola, Theresa Binion runs the Illinois Amish Interpretive Center, a museum dedicated to the history of the Illinois Amish. The center features photographs and books, along with examples of Amish quilts, furniture, clothing and carriages.

Binion is a Mennonite and questions the judgment of county fair organizers who invited The Electric Amish.”I think it’s making fun of somebody’s religion,”Binion said.”I can’t imagine you could make fun of black people or gays and get away with it.” To the members of The Electric Amish, none of whom are Amish, their act is satire, pure and simple. It grew out of an early morning syndicated radio program called The Bob and Tom Show, on which the band is regularly featured. Metcalf works as the show’s producer. The other musicians, Kyle and and Barclay Grayson, run an Indianapolis financial planning company as their”day”jobs.”Certainly it’s comedy and we never intended to harm anyone with what we’re doing,”Kyle Grayson said.

Harm, if any, would come only if the music perpetuates negative stereotypes, according to Donald Kraybill, provost of Messiah College in Grantham, Pa., and author of”The Riddle of Amish Culture”(Johns Hopkins University Press).”If the lyrics aren’t insidious, it doesn’t strike me as particularly offensive,”Kraybill said.”But do groups take more freedom with the Amish because the Amish are not as engaged in the society? And if they were Hispanics, African-Americans or Asians, would it be seen as just as funny?” (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

In Arthur’s downtown business district, tourists crowd the small shops to buy Amish-oriented merchandise. At the Pewter Spoon at the intersection of Vine and Illinois Streets, a clerk hurries a reporter out of the store when questions come up about The Electric Amish concert.”It’s not any different from jokes about short people,”the woman said, refusing to give her name.”They (the Amish) don’t care. One of them said they were more concerned about the beer tent than the band because the band won’t hurt anybody but somebody could get drunk and cause a wreck.” (END OPTIONAL TRIM)

Even critics attribute the vocal opposition to the non-Amish, a fact band members are also quick to point out.”The true Amish are not even going to know about us because they don’t have radios and TVs,”said Kyle Grayson.

DEA END MELCHIORRE