My Summer in a Gospel Group
We were a small Southern gospel group — more garage band than anything polished. A keyboardist who carried the lead, a guitarist, a drummer, two other singers, and me. There was an older gentleman who’d sing a featured solo. Very moving.
We weren’t great. But we had something.
We played maybe a dozen shows, mostly Pentecostal churches. Up-tempo songs, then ballads that slowed the room down. People closed their eyes. People meant it.
I was the outsider. Mostly, everyone was born-again. I wasn’t.
At first, it didn’t matter.
We rehearsed at my house, around the dining room table. Simple. Voices finding each other, locking in, re-arranging, trying again.
In the next room — just beyond the wall — my daughter Erica lay in a hospital bed.
She had lissencephaly. Severe. She didn’t move through the world the way most people do. But she heard it. She felt things. You could see it in her face.
She was there during rehearsals, asleep or resting, while we sang.
They didn’t even know she was there.
Not at first.
One night, someone asked, “Is that your daughter?”
“Yeah. That’s Erica.”
No one said much after that. Not really.
But Erica heard all of it.
A Memoral Outing
Once, my wife Michelle brought her to a performance — one of the churches. They sat right in front.
The music started. It was loud.
Erica responded immediately — smiling, laughing, moving in the way she could. The sound reached her.
People in the congregation reacted in different ways. Some were visibly shaken — like they didn’t know where to look. Others lit up completely, glad she was there, glad she came out into the world.
That moment felt real.
Not doctrine. Not rules. Just something happening in the room.
A Test of Faith
At the same time, other tensions were building.
My wife is Catholic. That became an issue. Not directly at first, but it came up — comments about what she believed, how Catholics “do things wrong,” about honoring Mary, about saints.
It was framed like a problem that needed correcting.
It didn’t make sense to me. She believed in Jesus. That part was never in question. The rest felt like splitting hairs and calling it truth.
But it mattered to them.
And so did everything else.
Our Own Tour Bus!
One of the guys — the other singer, the one who was becoming a friend — bought an old Eagle tour bus. The kind with the reputation. Rode like a calm rocking horse down the highway. That front window slanted across the roof, so you could see the road opening up ahead of you.
We took it to Tennessee.
Custom paint. Rolling down the road like we were something bigger than we were. For a while, it felt like maybe we were.
We even sang on a restored train once — a fundraiser out of Gettysburg, into the countryside, and back again. Metal wheels on rails, motion under your feet, voices filling the car.
Those were the moments that held.
But underneath it, things kept tightening.
They wanted to convert me. Not casually — persistently.
At the same time, I was deep into barbershop quartets, competitions, and a chorus that was gaining ground. It mattered to me. It fit my life just fine.
That wasn’t good enough.
They wanted me to quit.
Said I needed to choose.
Then came the smaller fractures.
One night, rehearsal at my house. One of the guys brought his father, a drummer. My wife and I had just come back from Ocean City, Maryland. We’d helped host a large after-glow at one of the hotels. A cooler sat off to the side.
He opened it.
“What’s this?”
“Beer from the convention we attended.”
That was enough.
From there, everything got filtered — what I did, what I believed, even what I allowed in my own house.
It stopped being about music.
It became about conformity.
I can sing gospel music. I respect it. I feel it.
I don’t need to be remade to participate in it.
And I wasn’t going to be.
So it unraveled.
All at once. Like it never happened.
I still think about that summer.
The Eagle bus rolling gracefully down the highway. The train ride out of Gettysburg. Voices around the table. And that moment in the church, front row, where the music reached Erica, and she gave something back to the room.
That part stays.