Has any Imam, Priest, Monk, or what-have-you ever joined Sister Smile on the Top 100?
Besides Sœur Sourire (The Singing Nun), Has Any Cleric Or Member Of A Religious Order Had A Hit Song
The Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos hit #3 with their album of Gregorian chant in the mid 90s.
ETA: if you count albums. Not sure if they had any charting singles. I don’t really understand how Billboard charting works.
Sister Janet Mead had a hit with a rock version of, “The Lord’s Prayer.”
The monks who did the album of Gregorian chant did pretty well with it. [ETA: pfft, ninja’d by Bayard]
The soundtrack for Seven Years in Tibet had Buddhist monks singing, but I don’t know if it charted.
And the album The Priests, by The Priests, who are priests, seems to have performed pretty well too.
Wiki tells me that Al Greene had his biggest charting hits before becoming a pastor. He continued to record after joining the clergy and collected some Grammys (Grammies?), but I don’t know how high his music charted.
I feel this somehow entitles me to mention the Rev Richard Coles, ex-Communards member who AFAIK got out of the music business before being ordained so probably doesn’t count at all.
Not a piece of commercial music but I’m pretty sure ordained Minister Fred Rogers "Won’t You Be My Neighbor?" is more well known than all these other songs combined.
The Montfort Mission aka The Mission, a folk singing group of Jesuits working in the inner city, put out several major label albums in the 1960s and at least one minor hit out of them.
Don’t forget the coolest dancing man on earth Pastor Jason Alvarez
Richard Penniman (aka Little Richard) is another example of a singer who became a clergyman. But while he still performed (in fact, I’m not sure he’s officially retired although he hasn’t performed since 2013), his hits came before he was ordained.
Richie Furay, who was in Buffalo Springfield with Stills and Young, then in Poco with Messina and a different Young, has been a pastor for quite a while.
I asked a friend who’d been to his church and got this quip: “As a preacher, he’s a great musician.”
"His newest album, Hand in Hand, “could be from a Buffalo Springfield album” (and would have, if he and Neil and Stephen had kept it up after headlining at Bonnaroo).
Father Ted Crilly and Father Dougal McGuire had a deal of success with their Eurovision entry “my lovely horse” but I believe copyright issues scuppered a wider release.
Beat me to it!
If we can count people who weren’t “in orders” at the time, Peret is considered the father of Rumba Catalana (one of the “new palos”, or varieties, of flamenco) and eventually left music to become a pastor in the Iglesia Evangélica*; he later returned to the scene.
While Juan Luis Guerra is not ordained, he moved from the RCC to Evangelical protestantism and his songs reflect this.
- mostly Spanish Roma who do not trust the RCC inasmuch as they identify it with The Man, they’ve taken some elements from Luther but are in many ways a lot closer to the Spanish RCC than to American Evangelics or to Swedish Lutherans.
The Radha Krsna Temple had a couple of hit (UK chart) singles from their album.
Came in here to mention Little Richard. He was ordained in 1970. While his biggest hits were before that, the did have some songs reach the charts during and after that year. 3, possibly 4, made the top 100 US. I’m not sure if Freedom Blues was released before or after his ordination.
The Rev. Richard Coles was part of 80s pop duo The Communards before taking holy orders.
Moderator Action
Moving thread from General Questions to Cafe Society.