Few children are fortunate to grow up with a piano in the family home.
It’s even more rare to pick up the chords that your older siblings are playing, and to immediately deliver your own rendition.
With one hand.
At age 5.
That’s the startup story for Pastor Ronnie Bryant, who moved to Jacksonville seven years ago, where he is pastor of Kingdom City Church, and so he now has named the singers the Prayed Up Reunion Choir.
When his parents — Pastor Roger Lee Bryant Sr. and evangelist Eva Mae Bryant — discovered that their kindergartner at Salina School was a child musical prodigy, they showed him off at a South Side community anchor, Pastor Ernest W. Bothuel’s Bethlehem Baptist Church.
“The people were amazed,” he recalls, laughing with self-modesty at the memory.
His parents, and his six siblings, favored a charismatic, exciting style that would reverberate through the house.
“I found the playing and the music to be fascinating,” he says, “and it has been with me for all of my life.”
He continued through his years at Salina, then Webber Junior, then Saginaw High, where he graduated in 1974. He became a fixture at his alma mater, serving in the music department and volunteering as a leading supporter of the Trojan athletic teams.
Residents know Pastor Bryant for playing, singing and sometimes eulogizing at countless memorial funeral services through the years.
“I always saw it as a service to people in their time of need,” is his simple explanation.
But don’t ask for Bryant’s favorite gospel hymn, because he says he doesn’t have one.
“Not really,” he says, “I love them all.”
To listen to Prayed Up’s 2003 CD of the same name, click here.
