Green, Keith

Author

b Brooklyn, New York 1953; d 1982. Born into a showbusiness family, he began on the ukulele at 3, piano at 6, and wrote his first songs at 11. Rejecting the Jewish faith of his parents and the Christian Science of his upbringing, he played and sang in hippie clubs and bars until the mid-1970s, involved with drugs and the occult, writing songs about searching and need but steering clear of church. Married to Melody, with her he became a Christian and found deliverance from his addictions. He became a keen Bible student and evangelist, and a trenchant critic of the worldliness and weakness of much American Christianity including the cult of ‘evangelical’ celebrity stardom and self-promotion. On Christian rock music he said ‘It isn’t the beat that offends me, nor the volume—it’s the spirit. It’s the “Look at me!