Mark Kelly

Petra is an American music group regarded as a pioneer of the Christian rock and contemporary Christian music genres and was, for many years, regarded as the "world's most popular Christian rock band".

This mix of evangelism with rock placed Petra among the early pioneers of Jesus Music, part of the larger counterculture Jesus Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Church authorities struggled with and frequently opposed the use of churches for rock concerts, and few Christian radio stations, with the exception of some college-based signals, would play the band's songs.

Petra was criticized for its rock sound, a hint of the opposition it would experience as its popularity grew.

Petra's blend of style and message attracted the attention of the newly created Myrrh Records' Paul Craig Paino, who convinced the label's founder, Billy Ray Hearn, to attend one of the band's concerts at The Adam's Apple.

In the early 1970s, songwriter and guitarist Bob Hartman met bassist John DeGroff and formed the band Dove, which he quickly disbanded when DeGroff left to attend a Bible school in Fort Wayne, Indiana, known as the Christian Training Center.

Formed in 1972, the band took its name from the Greek word for "rock".

Hartman soon followed, and in 1972 he and DeGroff joined two classmates, guitarist Greg Hough and drummer Bill Glover, to form Petra.

The band played small Midwest venues such as churches, coffeehouses and parks, to share the message of Christianity with concertgoers.

Glover said on an interview "we weren't picky and we wanted to get God's Word out to our peers. We would set up in parking lots, parks, college campuses, coffee houses, etc."

A frequent venue was a Fort Wayne Christian-themed coffeehouse named The Adam's Apple.

Hearn signed Petra in 1973 to record its debut album, which Hearn produced.

Hearn later said he knew Petra was "the most radical thing around ... as far out as anything that had come out until that time."

With no lead vocalist, Hartman and Hough shared singing duties on the self-titled debut, which was released in 1974.

Featuring "tight, Allman Brothers-type dual guitar lines and riffs", Petra also featured the comical country tune "Lucas McGraw", which became something of a cult classic, and the seminal "Backslidin' Blues", the first contemporary Christian blues song put on vinyl.

The rarity of being a Christian rock band led to larger concerts and greater popularity, and Myrrh asked Petra to record a second album aimed principally at non-Christians, reflecting the evangelistic nature of the band's shows.

With a style initially similar to The Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd, Petra's sound evolved into a more energetic, driving rock sound in the early 1980s akin to Foreigner, Styx and Journey.

Throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, Petra was one of the world's most popular Christian rock bands, with each of its albums during that period selling hundreds of thousands of copies while the band sold-out arenas and regularly placed songs at the top of Christian radio charts.

With its lyrics, music and style, Petra influenced numerous other artists at a time when Christian rock experienced strong opposition from many conservative pastors and churches.

In more than three decades, the band experienced numerous lineup changes yet released 20 studio albums, as well as two Spanish-language and two live albums, selling nearly 10 million copies while being nominated for 13 Grammy Awards, winning four, and winning 10 Dove Awards.

Its biggest hit, "The Coloring Song", reached the top position on three Christian radio charts simultaneously, and at its peak, the band's tours rivaled Amy Grant's in popularity among Christian audiences.

Petra was the first rock band inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame and the first Christian band whose memorabilia was included in the Hard Rock Cafe restaurant chain.

In the 1980s, the band began using keyboards and synthesizers to complement its guitar-based rock.

Early in the decade, Petra produced a straightforward pop/rock sound reminiscent of Foreigner and Styx while increasingly using synthesizers and electronic effects as the decade progressed.

By the late 1980s, Petra used a change in vocalists to embrace a guitar-based hard rock style similar to Def Leppard, Aerosmith and Journey – a style that, along with the growing popularity of Christian rock as a whole, led to Petra's peak success.

With the rise of alternative rock in the mid-1990s, the band's albums subsequently featured an increasing reliance on acoustic guitars and mellower tunes, including a fully acoustic album.

Petra returned to its roots with a hard rock album in 2003, while the 2010 Classic Petra reunion was billed as an effort to re-record some of the band's early 1980s hits "with a modern edge".

It included two new songs that fit within the guitar- and keyboard-based rock style that marked much of the band's early career.

The band announced its retirement in 2005, launching a farewell tour that was recorded for release on CD and DVD.

Though it disbanded formally in 2006, incarnations have played reunion shows in the years since and released two albums in November 2010, and in November 2017.

Petra's 33-year career ended with a performance in the early hours of January 1, 2006, in Murphy, North Carolina.

However, the band has continued to perform sporadically since then.

It released an album, Back to the Rock, featuring one new song ("Too Big To Fail"), one song taken from Greg X. Volz's 2009 album God Only Knows ("[Back To] The Rock"), as well as re-recordings of hits from that era.

In November 2010, an incarnation of the band's mid-1980s lineup surfaced under the name Classic Petra.

The band released a companion live CD and DVD in 2011.

In 2023, the band celebrated its 50th anniversary with a US and world tour.

Petra's style changed significantly over the decades in an effort to remain relevant to the youth it was trying to reach but remained within the rock genre implied by its name.

At its inception, the band's style was eclectic, borrowing from musical influences as diverse as The Eagles, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Kansas.

Early albums featured electric double-guitar leads reminiscent of the Allman Brothers Band.

In 2013, it reformed with a new drummer, Cristian Borneo, and recorded a new song titled "Holy is Your Name", before going back on tour.