The Gospel of Analisa

At 16, Analisa Bailey took the stage at the Good Shepherd Church in downtown Brownsville, decked out in a frilly white top and striped black pants another congregant had made for her. She was ready to sing.

She had just graduated from Porter High School and was set go to the University of North Texas in Denton in the fall, having graduated from high school two years early.

Bailey, who now prefers to go by Analisa, had the support of the hundreds of friends and neighbors who crowded the room, standing to fill every space in the auditorium to hear her already locally famous voice.

“But I was shaking like a leaf,” she said looking around the church on Elizabeth Street. “My whole body was shaking in this white holier-than-thou outfit.”

Bailey opened her mouth and found herself preaching to the audience. She was talking about God, giving advice to those gathered, then, of course, she sang. When she finished, she saw the faces of those around her wet with tears. For the teenager, it was all too much.

“I wasn’t ready for all of that responsibility,” she said. “I was still dealing with a lot of things myself.”

Three years earlier, her abusive stepfather passed away, and Bailey says she was still in need of some healing. She was scared by the power her own preaching exerted upon others: she didn’t even know how to guide herself.

“I didn’t feel worthy, it scared me to death to see their response,” said Bailey, now 40-years-old and a professional singer.

She went to college and began studying voice, but she abandoned gospel music and focused instead on jazz and classical. She took psychology classes as well.

At 19, one of her friends told her about a jazz band that was holding auditions for a female singer.

At the time, Bailey was tired. She was in her flip-flops, had a cold, and wasn’t prepared for an audition. But the musician was Fort Worth native Red Young and Analisa decided she’d do as her friend said and “chalk it up” as another experience.

“When I got in there, the room was packed with girls with 40’s hairdos, with big songbooks, and there I was in my flip flops with three songs I wrote myself on paper by hand,” she said. “I just sat in the back of the room and didn’t listen to a single one of the other girls audition.”

But then it was Bailey’s turn to take the stage. She snapped out the beat to the drummer with the gusto of a lusty lounge singer and began to sing.

“I don’t know what happened to my cold, but my voice came out and we were swingin’,” she said. “Red Young and his band and I were swingin’.”

They kept her up there for three songs.

“The next day I got the call.”

Bailey toured for a year and then returned to college. But a musician’s life wasn’t as fulfilling as she had hoped.

Bailey found herself struggling for fulfillment between the rock and roll music she was singing and the string of disappointing relationships she’d had.

“I lacked confidence, I wasn’t deeply rooted in my faith,” she said. “I had no healthy boundaries in my relationships, I dated people who didn’t believe in Christianity, I strayed from God’s word.”

But six years ago, after divorcing her first husband, Bailey decided to rededicate herself to God and begin to sing gospel again.

“You’ve got to think of God like a friend. If you want to know him, you’ve got to hang with him,” she said. “Now I hang with God every day.”

These days, Bailey doesn’t hide her weaknesses. She has released her emotional baggage and married a man she trusts as a gentleman and friend. But she doesn’t regret the past.

“It makes me more relatable,” she said. “When I speak to people at a concert I can talk to them about molestation, about incest, about some of these terrible things that are so hard to express. And I can pray with people.”

Baily’s Web site includes a section where she posts prayers for people she’s met on the road, and she updates it often.

The singer’s gospel career has paid off. Her recent CD, “Jesus, He Brings Me Joy,” has been nominated by the Gospel Music Association for a Dove Award, what she calls the Christian music equivalent of a Grammy. The winner will be named in Nashville, Tennessee in April.

“The nomination is wonderful,” Bailey said, “but the lessons are what matter to me the most.”

On the Net:

www.analisamusic.com