The steel guitar became a voice in the House of God in the 1930s when the sound of the Hawaiian steel guitar became a Tin Pan Alley craze. Two brothers from Georgia, Willie and Truman Eason, took up the instrument. Truman played Hawaiian-style music and Willie bottleneck blues.

Willie is often recognized as introducing the steel into the House of God. In his hands, the steel was more than just a backdrop for congregational hymns; its unique “talking style” with its melodic cries and moans commanded as much attention as the most charismatic preacher or singer. The steel soaked in the spotlight and replaced the organ as the token instrument in the Church. This fit well with the House of God’s theology, which believed that all people, not just preachers and elders, could access the Holy Spirit directly.

When the Church’s founder, Mary Magdalena “Mother” Tate died in 1930, the group split into three dominions. Two of these dominions, called Keith and Jewell, continue to use steel guitars.

Sorry, snake-handlers, you’re just not chic anymore. There’s a new viper in town, a cherub with a steely demeanor and a howl that brings the throngs to their knees. Its basic name is the pedal steel, but under the soft glow of the Pentecostal, it becomes the sacred steel.

Its handler must be sound of mind. He or she must not over think; intuition and feel must take over. If there’s a lack of dexterity and instinct, the steel is no longer sacred; and no one lassoes the temperament of the pedal steel better than 24-year-old Robert Randolph.

His fingers glide over the instrument like an obsessive massage therapist. Churchgoers (at his native Pentecostal Church of God in Orange, N.J.) swoon to his sound; club goers (who pop their music in the vein of free jazzers Medeski Martin and Wood, or the delta boogie of the North Mississippi Allstars) sweat out their inhibitions by following every Randolph slide; and even music masters are wanting a glimpse of the man who is the link between God and boogie.

“Robert is incredible,” said John Medeski (of Medeski, Martin and Wood) to the New York Times’ Neil Strauss. “He’s inspirational to watch. He has great ears and takes everything in. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens when he checks out Hendrix and Coltrane and Bob Marley and starts getting into more secular spiritual music.”

That’s another thing. Randolph didn’t grow up listening to slide sultans like John Lee Hooker or Stevie Ray Vaughn. He used to listen to rap, R&B; but most of all he was exposed to the marathon stretches in the church, where services easily exceeded the five hour mark.

“It’s interesting to hear Robert play stuff that sounds like Duane Allman, or Edward Van Halen, even, and he’s never heard those things,” guitarist Luther Dickinson (of the North Mississippi Allstars) told the San Francisco Chronicle’s James Sullivan. “That kind of unconscious ability reinforces the idea that music is really just out there for anybody to get.”

“I’ve been given a lot of CDs,” Randolph told the Orange County Register’s Martin Wisckol. “People were saying I should hear all this stuff. Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin. ‘You haven’t heard the Beatles?!’ You know. They said I sounded like the Allman Brothers, and I’d never heard of the Allman Brothers.”

His major influences (before being recently turned on to his new favorite bands, the Allman Brothers and the Funky Meters) are his family. His grandparents are pastors and bishops, Robert’s father is a deacon, his mother is a minister, and his two siblings are singers. Younger sister, Lanasha, sang back-up vocals on Lauryn Hill’s tour and Grammy-winning album; and his older brother, E. J. (Everette Randolph), has worked as a voice trainer with Ms. Hill and the group Dru Hill. His cousin and bandmate, Danyell Morgan, is descended from one of the first steel players in the House of God Church, who is more than 100 years old.

Randolph claims that all he ever wanted to do was play in church. His search for mastery of the instrument, however, came when his Newark environment threatened to incinerate his future. Many childhood friends are either dead, in jail, or peddling drugs. It was the death of a gambling buddy, compounded by his parents’divorce, that drove the then 17-year-old to the seclusion of his room to learn the pedal steel.

“The more I’d get into playing, the more I’d hear that this friend or that friend was jumped or put in jail or shot,” Robert told Strauss. “And the more I heard things like that, the more I wanted to stay in my house and play the pedal steel. A year after I started playing, I decided that I wanted to be the greatest pedal steel player, and I wanted everybody to start playing pedal steel, like they do the guitar today.”

The pedal was Robert’s third long lost appendage, but it took awhile for the “suture to heal.”

“He was awful,” Father Randolph recalled to Strauss. “Every night he used to play: it was the worst thing you ever wanted to hear. Then I sent him up to Ohio with my father-in-law, who plays the steel guitar, and Robert came back after the summer and all of a sudden he was blowing people away with his playing. My father-in-law called me and said: ‘Guys like Robert, they only come around once in a while. I’ve been playing the steel guitar for the longest time, and I’ve never seen a kid who can retain information and play freely like him.’”

The beast didn’t truly unleash until a parishioner gave Randolph a Stevie Ray Vaughn album in 1998. Vaughn’s cover of “Voodoo Chile” became Randolph’s learning curve. Soon enough, Robert had elevated from the six string to his recent custom made 13 string.

Still, Robert had no idea that his playing would make any music maven salivate. As recently as two years ago, the church was his universe, and his fulfillment came when parishioners swooned to Robert’s playing like a sermon preached from a volcano.

Nationwide attention perked up with the release of a series of Arhoolie albums (a small Bay Area label specializing in blues and folk music) called Sacred Steel. Over a four year span, Arhoolie released a series of albums from Pentecostal stoppers like Aubrey Ghent, Glenn Lee, the Campbell Brothers, and Robert Randolph.

The Allstars and Medeski had separately discovered the sacred steel Arhoolie Records, and they subsequently started talking about uniting for a project based on the holy slide. Around the same time, the Allstars were given a recording of Randolph by a friend.

“It was the first song on the ‘Sacred Steel Live’ CD, and it was amazing,” Luther Dickinson told the L.A. Times’ Steve Hochman. “We had a show coming up in New York City and said, ‘Hey, this guy is in New Jersey. See if he can open for us.’”

Coincidently, Gary Waldman, a musician manager, learned of Mr. Randolph from a friend, Jim Markel, who had seen Robert rip it up at a sacred steel convention in Florida. Taking a gamble, Waldman invited the youngster to an audition.

“I was sitting a foot away from him, and my jaw just dropped when he started playing,” Waldman told Strauss. “I felt like I’d found Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, Duane Allman. The thing that really blew my mind was that in the middle of all these cool jams, he broke into the theme from ‘The Brady Bunch,’ which sealed the deal because I was like, ‘Where is this guy coming from?’”

Reeling like a tyke with a $20 bill in a candy store, Waldman recorded the audition and played the tape to Matt Hickey, who books shows at the esteemed Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan. After hearing the audition tape over the phone, Hickey instantaneously booked Randolph and his family band as an opening act for the North Mississippi All-Stars.

It was his first outside the church. Pews were replaced by a vacuous dancefloor, and the servants of the Lord were replaced by the indentured to the boogie. Randolph was nervous, but he knew that he had already conquered his biggest detractors— “Really, there’s no harder place to play than the church,” he said to Strauss. “You’ve got some major critics in the church.”

His reputation continues its ascension. His Family Band is currently on tour and they just released a live offering entitled, “Live at the Wetlands” (Dare Records). His shows are three hours of perspiring goodness, and Randolph has proven his adeptness at being the front man. So well, in fact, that he has quit his day job as a paralegal in Newark. Future opening dates with the Dave Matthews Band and Widespread Panic will only extend his lore, and it’s only a matter of time before Randolph’s name is on an arena marquee.

So how is the Church taking it back home? Let’s just say it’s been a chipping away process:

“I’ve been playing all these clubs in front of Jewish, Italian — all these different kinds of people,” Randolph told Sullivan. “People that I never got a chance to interact with.

“I could either stay here,” Randolph continued, “and let music be heard by a small number of African American people, or I could go out and play in front of millions. When I say that, some of them understand.”

Others are just amazed that secular music appeals to the “other side.”

“I get from church people, ‘The white people like that?’” he told Hochman. “I told them, ‘You gotta see it — they go crazy just like us! They’re clapping on the wrong beats, though.’”