For Musicians, Song Leaders & Worshipers · July 6, 2026
A Minister of Music Ministers First
By Robert Wright · Minister of Music, New Light Baptist Church
This week’s column is a tribute to the late Mrs. Brenda Kyles, who will be memorialized this Saturday at New Tabernacle Baptist Church. She was one of my first teachers, and much of what I know as a gospel music singer and director, I learned watching her. In 1987 I was nine years old, singing tenor in her youth choir, when she moved me from the choir stand to the keyboard. Few directors would have handed an organ to a boy that age, but she saw something and made room for it — and I’ve been walking through that door ever since.
Mrs. Kyles was a whole experience. She was a schooled musician in a day when many directors led by ear alone: she held a vocal degree, she could read music, and she could teach it, breaking a song open and handing each part back to the voices that had to sing it. She was also a builder. She c0-founded the local chapter of the Gospel Music Workshop of America and was installed by James Cleveland himself at New Tabernacle. That is no small thing. She didn’t merely carry us to the national workshop in Detroit — where, at nine, I first stood among thousands of singers — she planted that same standard in our own soil and held us to it year after year.
A minister of music ministers first — and plays second.
But here is what I most want every minister of music to hear. Before we ever sang a note, Mrs. Kyles would preach us a little sermon, because she understood that a minister of music ministers first and plays second. Then she went to work on the sound itself. She built it part by part — soprano, alto, tenor, and bass — and directed it by the time signature, her hand marking the meter and calling each section in right on the beat. We learned to watch that hand and answer it, and nothing half-learned ever got past her.
Some of what she built is still standing. The order of service she laid down has shaped worship at New Light and Ludden Chapel churches where I presently reside. Everything I play, I play because she invested first. Rest well, Director Kyles.
