Pastor DeWayne Harvey Has Reason to Celebrate

By Bob Marovich for The Black Gospel Blog.

Pastor DeWayne Harvey has cause to celebrate.

He has a new single, new album, new record company and, most importantly, a new lease on life after a near-death experience two years ago.

The Floridian minister told TBGB that he got his first taste of religious music while attending the Pilgrim Rest Primitive Baptist Church with his extended family.

“From a young age I was bit by the gospel bug,” he said. “My mother had three sisters and two brothers and they all sang Sunday mornings in the church choir. At the age of three, I started singing in the choir. I would have to be dressed like them, so if they wore a robe, they would have to make me a robe. If they wore suits, they would make my suits to match their suits.”

At thirteen, Harvey was made the church’s choir director. He credits his membership in the Primitive Baptist Church for his grounding “in that good traditional gospel sound.” It also surrounded him with singers “who could not only sing well, but whenever they opened their mouths, you could feel the presence of God.”

At fourteen, Harvey joined the First Born Church of the Living God, the denomination of fellow Floridians the Consolers, Sullivan and Iola Pugh. Harvey also spent time in the Missionary Baptist Church and in the Church of God in Christ, for which his father’s family helped plant a church. “So I’ve got a little bit of everybody mixed up in me!”

Not surprisingly, when he entered Florida A&M University, Harvey joined its renowned gospel choir and participated in at least one of the choir’s mid-1980s recordings. Afterwards, he moved to Sarasota, Florida, where he recorded with Bishop Henry L. Porter and the West Coast Gospel Chorus of Florida. While in Sarasota, Harvey organized a group of his own. DeWayne Harvey & Unrestrained Praise was made up of members from across the state and has four albums to its credit.

“From out of that group,” Harvey said, “God birthed the Greater Blessings Tabernacle of Faith Church that I now pastor.”

From Harvey’s non-denominational church in Tallahassee, Florida comes his fifth and latest project, The Report Of The Lord. The group on the album is comprised of “the singers I hear every Sunday morning at my church.” The CD will be released March 15, 2011 on the pastor’s label, Innovative Records, and distributed by Taseis Distribution.

Harvey organized Innovative Records because “artists rarely get any type of real revenue in gospel. In order to take my music to the next level, I had to take control and start my own record company.” With an MBA, the pastor has the business acumen needed to make it work.

“Celebrate,” the second single from The Report of the Lord, was released in mid-February.  Harvey hopes it receives the same positive response as the album’s first single, “Whose Report,” which met with critical review and made it to the Billboard Top Gospel Singles chart.

“Whose Report” was birthed out of a near-death experience in January 2009, when Harvey was diagnosed with sleep apnea, an inability to breathe normally while sleeping. It can ultimately exhaust the body. “I was always falling asleep,” Harvey said. “I stopped driving because when I’d drive, I’d fall asleep.”

The solution, the doctors said, was to perform minor outpatient surgery to open up his air passages. In and out, he’d be home in a couple of hours. So they thought.

“When I woke up in recovery, I was gasping for air,” Harvey related. “I couldn’t breathe. The nurse kept shaking me but I wouldn’t come to.” His airways collapsed. The minister thought he was breathing his last.

“At that time, I heard the devil say, ‘I got you now! Everything is over!’ But when they were rolling me back into surgery, I heard the voice of the Lord say, ‘Be healed!’ When I thought it was all over, God healed me.”

The doctors repaired Harvey’s airways and the minister recovered. “I believed the report of the Lord,” Harvey said, writing the song as his testimony. The song “is so apropos for this time,” he added.  “In the midst of recession, whose report are you going to believe?”

Harvey is now working on his first solo project, on which most of the songs will be his own compositions. He anticipates the album will be released in 2012. “I’ve always done albums with groups, and now God said ‘It’s time for you to do a solo project.’”