Thirteen-year old Ralph Hill isn’t the most famous kid preacher from Michigan. These days, that’s nine-year-old “Pastor Luke” Tillman, the Grand Blanc cutie-patootie who baptized his Paw Patrol stuffie in the bathtub, screamed glory to his Grandpa, and appeared on The Jennifer Hudson Show so many times he got his own highlight reel. Go viral like Pastor Luke, and you might wake up with half a million Instagram followers, a children’s book deal, and a presenter slot at the Black Christian Influencers awards. But hang around the BFA types instead, and your word might end up on a Ridgewood-based cassette label.
Recorded in 2023 and released this June, Live at Lavender Country presents a trio of Hill’s sermons with synths by artist and “church organist” Jonny Campolo—scare quotes because Campolo is no Cory Henry. He’s a chill-seeming guy with a Nord Stage 3 who befriended Hill while visiting Jeffrey Tranchell, a fellow artist who lives next door to Hill’s grandmother and who transformed the vacant lot across from their East Davison Village homes into a community garden, arts space, and lavender farm. Live at Lavender Country is adapted from Hill and Campolo’s improvisatory collaborations in the garden’s pop-up pulpit; one gets the sense that their creative communion, a kind of gospel-inflected performance art substituting traditional church accompaniment for atmospheric underscoring, is more revelatory in person. Notwithstanding, Live at Lavender Country still moves the spirit. It’s a testament to the virtues of neighborliness that offers an intriguing, if not entirely effective, twist on the sounds of Sunday service.
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In his 2024 PBS documentary GOSPEL, the public intellectual Henry Louis Gates traveled to the Hampton University Minister’s Conference to learn more about the relationship between preaching and music in the Black church. “Music is not separate from the preaching,” one reverend tells him. “Music is preparation for the preaching moment.” Hill clearly channels the musicality of Black church preaching in his homilies—he delivers his sermons as fervent filibusters, adding “whoops” when the spirit moves and gulping for air between rhythmic sentences like a policy debater. Topics cover familiar ministerial ground—God and glory, spiritual bereftness (“Our world has become no more than a social club”) and even prophecy (Tranchell, Hill foresees on the final track, will become a multi-millionaire). He adds tunes to some of his most poignantly poetic statements, like “God is a napkin in the middle of a weeping time” (an all-timer from “Snatched”). Full-body screams take hold of him more than once.
Usually when a preacher screams, a Hammond organ screams with them. In Black church music, following a preacher is its own art—“preaching chords,” the progressions that church accompanists often use, respond conversationally to cadences in the preacher’s voice, scoring the emotional valleys and peaks of their sermon and working the congregation up to a climactic close (for an especially adorable example, see again: Pastor Luke). Campolo accompanies in a mellower, less directly reactive register— his vaporous synths and blissed-out pads, played alongside twinkling chime rakes courtesy of the Hill Family Band, feel more suited for spas or soundbaths than revivals. “Snatched” has a few trills evocative of Emahoy Tsegue Maryam Guebro runs, but the sweeping, formless chords of “I Got Fuel Power Glory (Live)” feel fully new age—a stark contrast against Hill’s leaping voice. Only “Rebuilding the Altar” evokes preaching chords, though the gothic, minor-key organ sounds a bit more like Phantom of the Opera.
