Road to Freedom

New Wine/Wine Skin LP 259-08 (1973)

I’ve said more than once–too many times, perhaps–that South Florida is one of the toughest places in the U.S. to be a Christian. So it’s good to see that someone was trying to make a dent in the situation, just down the road from where I grew up and at the same time.

Road to Freedom is the product of just such an effort, headed up by Bob Heiple. By standards of the Jesus Music era, he put together a strong team to make it happen, including Cheryl Heiple and Steve Powell of Rainbow Promise. It’s a good album, a mixture of covers and original compositions. From a personal standpoint, to get ahead of the region’s “curve” one would like to see a more progressive bent to the album–in old South Florida terms, one more for the WSHE listener than the WQAM one.

The covers shows the group going down a straight road headed into the scrub. With the development that has engulfed the region, scenes like that are mostly a thing of the past. But it’s a good thing to remember things like that–and the Jesus Music era that went with them, in the land where the animals are tame and the people run wild, and need to take a straight road other than one that leads to the Everglades.

The songs: