Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
As a boy, Jerry Smith loved going to church and singing the “loud, clappy Baptist songs” that his mother adored. He went on to study music, but by then he knew he wouldn’t be directing any church choirs; who’d have him? He was gay.
Fifteen years ago, Smith walked into the Metropolitan Community Church of Greater St. Louis and knew he was home. MCCGSL had been founded in 1968 to welcome lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered Christians. Smith became the St. Louis choir director. And three years ago, the choir members decided they wanted to learn to sing gospel.
With, say, a Pentecostal gospel choir, all you need are a few chords or a shouted question, and people cut loose, swaying and clapping. But most of the MCCGSL choir members grew up in traditional churches, where they knelt and prayed silently, they read back responses, and when it came time to sing, they froze in place and opened only their mouths. If, that is, they hadn’t been told they were an abomination.
Smith stood on a platform and looked out at about 50 eager faces. Some looked like soccer moms and CEOs; others, like the guy with long Goldilocks ringlets, surprised convention. The closest thing they had to a common denominator was their inexperience. When he’d recruited for the choir, Smith had just said, “We’d appreciate it if you could match pitch.”
Now they’d fallen in love with gospel music, its struggle and hope and exuberance.
Not only would they have to learn to sing, they would have to learn to loosen up.
We all have to go from where we are,” Smith repeated regularly. “If you made 10 mistakes, make…less.”
Gradually, they did. They built a repertoire, combining old African-American spirituals with contemporary gospel. The choir’s new polish drew exceptional soloists. Eventually, the choir entered Verizon’s national How Sweet the Sound gospel-choir contest and surprised themselves by doing well. Could they ever win it, though?
Earlier this year, Smith begged JT Ricroft, a friend who’s sung and choreographed professionally, to teach the choir how to move.
“Historically, that hasn’t…gone well,” Ricroft grins. Their first attempt had been a side-to-side movement that was less a bluesy sway than a stilted bounce. “Jerry knew that was what separated them from the other choirs,” Ricroft says. “We added movements only where it made sense. We didn’t want it to look like Glee.”
It helped to watch the sign-language interpreter, Jimmy Walsh. (When MCCGSL set out to be inclusive, it didn’t stop with sexual orientation.) The soloists, too, knew how to use their bodies. Adria Webb, who also sings rock and soul, will toss her derrière-length braids back and bend low as she sings an emphatic line. John Rhine has the vocal range you’d get if you tucked Beverly Sills inside Luciano Pavarotti. His energy throws off sparks, and he never stops moving.
“Gospel has to resonate within you—you have to feel it,” he says. “And in order to put that feeling out there in sincerity, you have to have experienced something. It’s why I’m never still, because there have been so many difficulties I’ve gone through…and God has always been there. I’ve been brought through those things.”
In the end, it was the music itself that loosened up the choir. They gave back its energy, relaxed into its promises. At rehearsals, you could see the change increase with each run-through, like a time-lapse photo of a rose opening.
On September 26, MCCGSL was named the Best Large Choir and Best Overall Choir at the regional How Sweet the Sound competition. The choir won $10,000, and everybody got a cellphone and a free trip to the finals in Los Angeles, but what mattered, what they couldn’t stop talking about, was what gospel artist Marvin Sapp said after their finale: “This is what heaven is supposed to look like. It’s supposed to look like a multiplicity of cultures, colors, creeds all coming together for the sole purpose of magnifying and glorifying the God of our fathers.”
"Zigamama, zigamama, zing zing zing,” the choir sings. It’s mid-October, and they’re practicing for L.A. Smith’s just learned they will sing their favorite song, “Let Our God Arise,” adapted from Psalm 68, as their finale.
“Make sure it’s a good singy ‘Hey!’” he tells them, “not a shouty one.” This is what he’s come to love about gospel: “Big chords, big sounds, voices just wide open. A chorale choir might sing it perfectly, technically, but not have the same spirit coming through.”
The song builds—“You are amazing, powerful, and you are strong, invincible”—and Smith starts jumping. Not little nervous jumps, but high, springy ones, like he’s a kangaroo running in place. The energy crests, the band hits it hard, and they finish, hands trembling in the air in classic gospel iconography, then they break off and let their hands swoop down as they bow. Smith glows like they’ve won all over again.
Isn’t it hard, singing alongside people who, in many cases, think your body and mind’s impulses are Satan’s work?
“They don’t have to like us,” shrugs tenor Steve Pursley. “But they do have to listen to us!”
“To me, Marvin Sapp’s words were what it’s all about,” says Pursley. Last year, when he donated a kidney to his mother, the choir visited the hospital. They later hugged her when she came to one of their services. It had taken her years to get comfortable with her son being gay, but it took only a minute to get comfortable at MCCGSL.
Afterward, she told him, “This is the most welcoming church I’ve ever been to.”
