Pastor Champion

Pastor Wylie Champion was a man out of time, an enigma. An itinerant preacher, a pastor without a church, he was an outsider gospel artist who spent decades roaming up and down the California coastline armed with an electric guitar, playing, singing in a seasoned yet honeyed baritone, and preaching along the road well into his seventies. Amazingly, even in the 21st century, it is possible to be largely anonymous. Very little is objectively known about him. A tightlipped man who preferred to let his music do the talking, we know that he was born Wylie Champion in Shreveport, Louisiana, one of 14 children, and that he was the brother of soul singer Bettye Swann. He was also a father of five and a skilled carpenter. The few other autobiographical details imparted by Pastor Champion speak of a hard life: His father was a gambler, and his mother was accosted by the Ku Klux Klan. He was once jailed for 90 days for using a "whites only" bathroom during segregation. As a younger man he was a gang member and had a street name; he also wore a large tattoo of a Maltese Cross on his left hand. Champion spent the last four decades of his life playing and preaching in almost any church that would host him. In 2013 he started a YouTube channel, but it hosts only three videos. He is most often seen in those posted by Bishop Dr. W.C. McClinton of Oakland, California's 37th Street Baptist Church. McLinton has presented visiting musicians and preachers on their video channel for many years. The 37th Street Baptist Church's video channel is where Luaka Bop first encountered Champion. While assembling their stellar The Time for Peace Is Now: Gospel Music About Us compilation, they saw his videos and were so impressed, they decided to record and release his debut album. Using McLinton as an intermediary, they got in touch with Pastor Champion and in 2018, used 37th Street Baptist as a studio; it seemed only fitting since the Luaka Bop reps had initially heard him playing in their sanctuary. Over two evenings, Champion taught a group of musicians who never played together before a handful of songs from the nearly 2,000 fragments and sermons he regularly performed. (By his own admission, and in the grand Black gospel tradition, many of Champion's sermons and songs were improvised on the spot.) They recorded the minister live to an analog two-track reel-to-reel tape machine, in order to best reflect the traditional gospel recordings of both his era and his performances. Champion was uncooperative with producers when it came to providing the label with autobiographical details other than the few we have. When Luaka Bop played back the tapes, they understood their unique, almost otherworldly quality, but were unsure of how to present them to the greater public. They sat on them for a couple of years as they puzzled. For his part, Champion understood his music was a hard sell, but it was of no concern. His purpose had always been to get the message out in the same way that he always had -- with his voice and an electric guitar no matter the medium. Champion didn't live to see the release of his only album. He died on December 28, 2021 at age 75, just a few months after his mother. Luaka Bop issued his I Just Want to Be a Good Man in April 2022.
© Thom Jurek /TiVo