Blackchristiannews.com
In the new Netflix show Voices of Fire, Grammy Award winner Pharrell Williams and his uncle, Bishop Ezekiel Williams, envision a diverse choir that will draw people to God through gospel music. As they hold auditions to find talent in Pharrell’s hometown of Hampton Roads, Virginia, they witness how the sung gospel changes the lives of its singers.
Kathryn Kemp, author of three books on gospel music, interviewed the choir’s director Patrick Riddick, also a pastor, about how he saw God at work in the show.
I see that God has blessed and used you from a young child to share the gospel first in song, then through sermons. How did that experience help you bring a nontraditional gospel choir to the understanding and appreciation needed to sing gospel music?
It was kind of a one-two punch. It helped me tie together all I had experienced and knew about music, and I was able to use that to create illustrations concerning the Word of God. Some of the singers had never gone to church. Some of them had never sung gospel. And so, as I began to teach music, I began to marry it with the Word. And then experience came in, and the experience was undeniable—what they were experiencing because of that. Having the preached Word background as well causes me to be more sensitive to the purpose of what we do musically, especially in gospel music. With that awareness and that sensitivity, it just makes it easier to administer it to the singers.
Are there any divine moments that stand out to you from the show?
During the rehearsals, there were these singers that were novices or had never experienced gospel music before. And some of them were not Christian. We were in our first or second rehearsal, and I had them blending. And then I was teaching them that blending and singing together corporately is the greatest kind of worship. God commands corporate worship; there’s something about when we all get together. And they began to grasp that. And the moment their sound changed because they became unified musically and in the Spirit—you begin to see tears fall. Some of them didn’t even understand, and they began to lift their hands in the moment. And some of them began to come up, because Bishop was there, and say, “I don’t know what’s going on, but I want more of this. Tell me about this.” That started about the second rehearsal, and it continued in every rehearsal that we had while we were shooting.