A TASTE OF HEAVEN: The Heartbreak Life of Raymond Myles, Gospel Genius of New Orleans

Short Synopsis

A TASTE OF HEAVEN celebrates the heartbreak life of the sensational New Orleans gospel entertainer Raymond Myles. The documentary feature film traces his rise from grinding poverty to artistic acclaim, and examines the complex personal issues in a life tragically cut short, on the cusp of stardom, by Raymond’s murder. 

Description/Treatment

A TASTE OF HEAVEN: The Heartbreak Life of Raymond Myles, Gospel Genius of New Orleans takes us on Raymond's dramatic journey from a childhood of abject poverty to the brink of music stardom -- a journey cut short when he was murdered during a carjacking outdside the French Quarter in October 1998.  You can view a trailer at: http://www.raymondmylesmovie.com/

Raymond’s legacy lives on in the highest echelons of New Orleans’ musical community. "Raymond was one of my biggest influences," says Harry Connick, Jr. "We were good friends for years. He opened my concerts in New York with his full choir and band. He was one of the most powerful and talented musicians I’ve ever known."

From his impoverished beginnings in the everyday violence of the city's housing projects, Raymond Myles became a dedicated public school music teacher whose commitment to young people steered many of them away from ruin during a murderous crack epidemic in the Nineties. Raymond viewed education as a way out of poverty, and he viewed faith as a tool for social progress. Driven by that faith, Raymond extended his mission beyond the stage and the recording studio into the hardscrabble streets of New Orleans. He waged a long, hard personal war on the city’s drug culture and sang at countless funerals for its casualties. His tireless efforts to shape and influence so many young lives represented the best in the human spirit. As A TASTE OF HEAVEN demonstrates, that spirit is still alive in those he touched. 

By exploring Raymond’s faith-based musical and social activism, A TASTE OF HEAVEN offers fascinating insights into the world of New Orleans' black churches and the closely-knit, often insular, religious community that sustains them. But the story of Raymond Myles also lifts the veil on a controversial subject rarely addressed in print or on film: the taboo status of homosexuality in the black church. Raymond's internal battle against prejudice and his rejection by intolerant forces amongst his own people invests A TASTE OF HEAVEN with deep emotional resonance. Raymond was a highly visible representative of a vital but scorned minority within the black New Orleans church community: gay worshippers who face ostracism only because of their sexuality. Without judgment or prejudice, the film addresses the tensions raised by conflicts between the established cultural norms of the black and religious communities and its coexisting gay subculture. What is spirituality? Who decides what is moral and what is not? What makes a person good or bad? 

A TASTE OF HEAVEN is not another Katrina film. Yet the tens of thousands of people who remain displaced by Katrina were Raymond’s people. He shared their streets and embodied their values and their struggles in the years before the levees failed. Seen through the larger prism of complex issues affecting the rebuilding of New Orleans after Katrina, Raymond's uplifting life story stands as an inspiration for those in the diaspora of the forgotten. The film makes a direct connection between Raymond's life, music and community service, and those who are still fighting to preserve the vital community and culture assaulted by Katrina and its aftermath. 

People in New Orleans took great pride in Raymond Myles. They said that he carried the gift of greatness. They compared him to giants like Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke, because just like them he was nurtured in the cradle of the church. And like them, he was blessed with a voice of astonishing power. He was a brilliant pianist, too -- a stand-out in a city known for its keyboard kings. If you heard him once, you remembered him forever. Some looked at Raymond's wild stagecraft and saw the second coming of Little Richard. Others saw a messenger, a prophet and a healer. Like a comet shooting across the sky, he was here one minute -- brilliant, incandescent and unmistakably unique. And then, just as quickly, he was gone. Raymond Myles would have said it was all for a Higher glory. 

He was born into a world built on a foundation of unshakeable faith. The people in this world draw their strength from abiding trust in a Higher Power. Raymond Myles was one of these people. The ninth of ten children, he had pride of place with his mother, the much-loved gospel dynamo Christine Myles. A flat-foot sanctified shouter, "Mama Chris" sang about salvation in a dark and bluesy voice -- a voice colored with rough edges and life's most bittersweet experiences. Chris grew up in segregated New Orleans during the Great Depression. This was before Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King bravely challenged history and before the snarling dogs and water cannons and freedom marchers made the nightly news. Chris never had a formal education, but she taught her children the living language of spiritual song.

They lived in the grinding poverty of the St. Bernard housing project. St. Bernard symbolized the harsh reality of ghetto life. It was a forbidding place where drugs and gangs flourished, and drug addicts and criminals lurked in stairwells, and mothers put their babies in bathtubs when they heard gunshots, and corrupt police officers had the power to make people mysteriously disappear. There was also a mysterious alchemy mixed into the humidity -- the sound of swaggering brass bands and Mardi Gras Indians and high-stepping, hip-shaking carnival clubs. Raymond took in this robust roux of Afro-Caribbean-influenced rhythms as the revelers paraded through St. Bernard. It was as magical and indestructible as New Orleans herself, and it filled her people with pride and power and communal joy, and this was Raymond's heritage, too. 

Raymond's father was a phantom in his life, forcing his older brothers to bear a familiar burden to feed the family. Sometimes his brothers stole to survive, and some of them spent time in jail. Other times, the family went to bed hungry. But Chris told her children to walk by faith, not by sight, because a merciful God was watching and protecting them. When Chris brought a milk crate to church and gave little Raymond the microphone, the faithful celebrated their holy union. Then Chris introduced little Raymond to the Queen Mother of Gospel -- New Orleans' own Mahalia Jackson -- and you could feel the anointing. Soon they were climbing the rough side of the mountain together as "Christine Myles and Son." The adulation carried them -- like Elijah's fiery chariot -- from the grim reality of their mean streets to their own little taste of heaven. 

They say that in New Orleans, everyone knows everyone else's secrets. In his short, turbulent life it seemed that everyone in New Orleans knew that Raymond Myles had his secrets, too. They knew that he lived a life of conflict, and contradiction -- a life lived fully in the spotlight, but also in the shadows; that he had fathered two children with two different women while living with the knowledge that he was gay. That his "best friend" had died of AIDS. His music was a testament to the sublime comforts of faith and trust in a loving God. But as hard as he tried, Raymond Myles never felt that his community could embrace him with that same faith and trust. These feelings of isolation and disconnection reflected a lifetime of struggle with his elders in the black church, a struggle that boiled down to their belief that homosexuality is an abomination. “If I’m a Christian," he asked, "doesn’t that make me a child of God, too?" 

In his transcendent gospel music career, Raymond Myles personified the spiritually focused artist struggling for career traction in an entertainment culture firmly rooted in the secular. The heartbreak in his life lay in his failure to attain his goal just when it was within his grasp. Raymond’s tragic and untimely end came just before he might have won the acceptance he so deeply craved as an artist and a man.

In the summer of 2001, a young acquaintance of Raymond's who was also a career criminal pleaded guilty to "accessory after the fact to first-degree murder." He was sentenced to 20 years at Louisiana's notorious Angola state penitentiary. As he sits behind prison walls surrounded by the sugar cane fields of West Felicina Parish, about 60 miles northwest of Baton Rouge, Rodrick Natteel is left to wonder whether Raymond Myles has forgiven him. Those who know Raymond believe that he surely has.