Musical Preacher : Perseverance Pays Off for Singer Who Answered Call From God

Steve Hill was playing a dark country-Western bar in Ventura when he first felt the tap on his shoulder.

Next, a tugging took hold as he sang and played guitar and watched bartenders pour drinks to patrons who’d already had too much--women hard and lined before their time, men lost in battles with their sanity and each other.

When he started having the dreams though, Hill knew that it was time.

You see, Hill says today in his honeyed drawl, it was God who was calling. And when you’re raised a strict Southern Baptist in east Texas, you don’t ignore such communiques.

So in 1984, Hill--a musician who has seen hard times and excesses to rival the most gut-wrenching of country songs--followed his calling and was ordained a Pentecostal preacher.

“Most of the people I met in barrooms who needed help, they were my congregation,” Hill said. Musicians, too, were drawn to a church run by a fellow singer/songwriter. Soon, the faithful numbered 120.

Award Recipient

Today, fiddling for the Lord and his audiences has finally paid off. Tuesday in Nashville, Hill will receive two songwriting awards from Broadcast Music Inc., an industry association that holds annual competitions. He will share the honors with his friend and songwriting partner Chris Hillman (formerly of the 1960s country rock band the Byrds), with whom he pens all the lyrics for Hillman’s new musical endeavor, the Desert Rose Band.

Thanks in part to Hill, the Desert Rose Band has also been nominated in two categories in the American Country Music Awards, which will be held Monday. The band is a contender for “Best Vocal Group of the Year” as well as the “Horizons Award,” which goes to up-and-coming bands.

“It really feels gratifying,” Hill said about the recognition that has finally come his way. “It’s like tying a rope around a train and trying to pull it all these years. Finally that sucker is starting to roll.”

But the tugging took a trainload of determination.

In the beginning, the singing preacher assembled his congregation in rented spaces--a meeting room at the Harbor Patrol office in Oxnard’s Channel Islands Harbor and a hall near the Lobster Trap restaurant. He called his church the Harbor Light Fellowship and said of some ardent members, “I’d see them Saturday night just plastered, but boy, they’d be there at church on Sunday morning.”

Flying Burrito Brothers

One of the better-known parishioners was Hillman, a Ventura-based musician who in addition to the Byrds, played with the Flying Burrito Brothers and now the high-riding Desert Rose Band. In 1985, Hill baptized Hillman.

“I checked out a lot of churches and I thought Steve was real down-to-earth. I’d come on Sundays and we’d sing together, mostly the old gospel stuff,” Hillman said.

Soon they were writing music together. And Hillman, who has written with such rock and country legends as Roger McGuinn and Steven Stills, said the preacher from east Texas can write with the best of them.

“There’s a song I wrote about my father’s death I could never have written with anyone else,” Hillman said. “He drew that out of me. He’s a good catalyst. We approach songwriting like a novel . . . not just some generic country Nashville love song.”

Together, the Hill/Hillman duo has written 30 songs, including some that hit the top of the country music charts, like “Summer Wind,” “Love Reunited” and “I Still Believe in You.” Their subjects are varied; the tunes deal with such topics as drug abuse, married love, homelessness, political unrest in Nicaragua, the death of a parent and child custody.

“We share similar backgrounds and values,” Hillman said. “Our families come first and we have both earned everything we ever got.”

These days, however, with a blossoming musical career tucked under his cowboy belt after 19 years in the business, 40-year-old Hill has stepped aside from the pulpit.

His preaching days ended in late 1986 when he sold his Ventura house and headed with his family to Nashville looking for musical stardom. But the Grand Ole Opry didn’t come a-courting; he sunk his money into a development deal that went sour and Hill came back to Ventura eight months later, flat broke.

But he persevered. Today, his recently formed Steve Hill Band plays a mix of gospel, Cajun and rollicking country tunes. He plays Mondays through Wednesdays at the Shores, an Oxnard nightspot, and can be seen Oct. 28 and 29 at the Point Mugu Air Show.

And he has more blessings than he can count.

‘Big Fancy House’

He has a “real big fancy house with six bedrooms, a swimming pool and a Jacuzzi” in Thousand Oaks, where he lives with his second wife, Marla, and their three children. (A 12-year-old son from an earlier marriage lives with his mother in Jacksonville, Tex.)

He co-owns a music studio in Agoura Hills that records and produces gospel music. And royalties are rolling in. “Three years ago I was homeless and now I have three hit records under my belt. I owe it all to God,” said Hill, a tall, broad-shouldered man whose hair, finely etched with gray, falls below his collar.

Hill is also feeling that familiar tugging again.

The Harbor Light Fellowship “sort of fizzled out” during Hill’s Nashville stint, and he talks now of starting another church. Until he does, he is active in Calvary Community Church, a charismatic Christian group in Westlake Village.

Religion comes in handy for him, even in bars.

One time Hill was playing “Orange Blossom Special” in a Carpinteria bar when he looked out and saw that “everybody in the place was fighting, stabbing, throwing chairs.”

Hill didn’t skip a note but launched immediately into “Amazing Grace.”

Calmed Brawlers

“That calms ‘em down,” he said.

Hill grew up dirt-poor in Longview, Tex., in an area of pine forests, rolling hills, rivers and wilderness that also produced such musicians as Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top, Edgar and Johnny Winter and former Eagle Glenn Frey.

Attending Stephen Foster State University in Nacogdoches, Tex., on a music scholarship, he played the trumpet and earned a bachelor’s degree in business. But it was roommate Rodney Crowell, now a successful producer/writer/musician married to Rosanne Cash, who taught him to love country music.

In 1978 at Crowell’s suggestion, he came to Los Angeles to audition for Emmylou Harris’ band. Although he didn’t get the job, he stayed out West pondering his next move, living with his family in a motor home parked at a friend’s Oxnard house.

One night when Hill was at a church meeting seeking guidance about whether to stay in the area or head back to Texas, disaster struck.

“I got home and there were firemen all around, and the motor home was all in flames. I said, ‘I guess I’m staying here,’ ” Hill recalled.

Guitar Undamaged

When he pulled a charred guitar case out of the wreckage, opened it and saw that his guitar had escaped unscathed, well, that cinched it.

“They say the Lord works in mysterious ways and that sure was mysterious,” Hill said.

Friends put them up for several weeks, but Hill soon got a job at Heck’s Music in Ventura and moved his family into a rented house.

He played gigs every night. His wife took a sales job at the Broadway. On weekends, Hill served as music director at the Apostolic House of Worship in Ventura, a Pentecostal church on Main Street.

Pentecostalism is a highly emotional form of religious worship that emphasizes prayer, faith healing, the belief in everyday occurrences of the supernatural and speaking in tongues.

Pastor Earl Meyers recalls Hill as a devout and enthusiastic parishioner.

‘Was a Good Boy’

“Yes, he was active in our church. He’d play the guitar and do lead singing and solos, and his wife would read Scripture. He was a good boy,” said Meyers, a man with snow-white hair who speaks in measured tones.

At the time, Hill often played Santa Paula bars with a musician who had become enamored of Eastern mysticism and said he heard voices. Unfortunately, however, the voices often told him to stop in the middle of a set.

“One night we said, ‘We’ve had it with this guy; we’re going to pray for him.’ He was well, possessed.”

And as Hill knelt down to pray, an odd thing happened.

“I found myself speaking in tongues. I had never given it any credence before, but it’s the spirit inside you speaking. It’s an extra little thing that God will give you,” he said.

By the mid-1980s, when Hill played local bars, word about the singing minister was out. Hill said people often sidled up to him to say skeptically, “So, I hear you’re a preacher. What are you doing here?”

Listen to Problems

Hill would explain that he was trying to make a living like everyone else and that Jesus hadn’t hung out with the saved. Then he would sit down and listen to their problems.

“When people are drunk, they get real sentimental. They want to hurt,” he said.

One time during a show in Santa Barbara, Hill learned that a woman in her late 20s had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. He stopped in the middle of the set, took her to a hospital and had her stomach pumped.

Then he took her home and had her live with his family for six weeks, talked to her about Jesus and eventually found her a job flipping burgers on a charter fishing boat.

“She works in L.A. now, goes to church regularly and has really changed her life around,” Hill said with evident pride.

Of course, not every experience ends on such an amazing note of grace. For everyone he helps, there are others who fall through the cracks.

“It eats me up. You bet I feel a sense of loss; I feel it physically,” he said.

It reflects in his songs too.

Bluegrass-Tinged Lament

A song about the homeless, a bluegrass-tinged lament, tells the tale of a woman and her children forced to live in a car after her husband loses his job and abandons them:

“In this land of milk and honey, we share with all who need,

Except the ones outside our door, the ones we cannot see.

It’s the proud, the true, the faithful, left out in the cold,

It’s people just like you and me at the end of the road.”

Hill can write with some knowledge about homelessness. When he came back to Ventura in 1987 after losing his money in Nashville, he lived with Jerry Roberg and his wife Carol, who run the Oxnard Rescue Mission in downtown Oxnard.

He also worked 12 gigs a week to earn money to bring his family back from Nashville. They eventually moved in with another Christian family, eight people sharing a two-bedroom house.

“They were real tough times,” Hill recalled. “I’ve been there. It’s a tough way to live.”