Raymond Anthony Myles Credit: Courtesy of Making Groceries Music & Filmworks

New Orleans’ best kept secret was on the brink of international stardom. He was a gifted gospel singer who mesmerized congregations, festival-goers and audiences alike.

Just as the title of his first album and a documentary about his life suggests, Raymond Myles was “a taste of heaven.”

“He made the most soulful music I had ever heard,” writer, producer and director Leo Sacks said in a 2022 Times-Picayune article. “It spoke to me in a way that other music never had. I knew instinctively that I wanted to become his producer and help him deliver his musical message to the wider world.”

Sacks not only produced Myles’ 1995 studio album but also created the 90-minute documentary, “A Taste of Heaven: The Ecstatic Song and Gospel of Maestro Raymond Anthony Myles.” 

The documentary website describes Myles as a brilliant pianist and choir director who was “blessed with a voice of astonishing power. He had a showman’s personality to rival Liberace’s. Some looked at his wild stagecraft and saw the second coming of Little Richard. Others saw a messenger, a prophet and a healer.” 

Born in 1958, Myles grew up in the St. Bernard Housing Development. He performed with his mother Christine in New Orleans churches as a child. As an adult, he toured the South and Europe with his choir, the Raymond Anthony Myles Singers (RAMS). The RAMS also performed with Harry Connick Jr., Al Green, Patti LaBelle and Aretha Franklin.

“But as hard as he tried,” Sacks said in a 2010 article, “Raymond never felt that his community embraced him with what he considered to be God’s unconditional love.”

Myles had a “lifetime of struggle with his elders in the Black church,” Sacks added, “a struggle that boiled down to their refusal to fully accept gay worshipers.” 

On Oct. 11, 1998, carjackers shot and dumped Myles on the corner of Elysian Fields Avenue and Chartres Street, where he died. He was 40. 

Thousands of mourners attended Myles’ funeral to show their love and respect for the gospel great. 

“Like a comet shooting across the sky, Raymond Anthony Myles was here one minute — brilliant, incandescent and unmistakably unique,” the website states. “And then, just as quickly, he was gone.”

For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.

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Tammy C. Barney is an award-winning columnist who spent most of her career at two major newspapers, The Times-Picayune and The Orlando Sentinel. She served as a bureau chief, assistant city editor, TV...