Jackie Hill Perry has always had a passion for words. As a young girl, she would lie in bed writing songs. In high school, she tried her hand at rapping. In college, she wrote poems, and as a young adult, she began writing books and giving speeches.
“Even if it’s Scrabble -- I’ll play Scrabble all day long. Because it’s got words in it,” she said, laughing.
In June, Perry’s unique gift for words led her to sign a record deal with Reach Records, which was founded by and is home to Grammy-winning artist Lecrae.
It’s a return to Christian Hip-Hop for Perry, who released albums on a different label in 2014 (The Art of Joy) and 2018 (Crescendo) before taking a lengthy break from music.
“After I did Crescendo, I kind of had a conversation with God just about my future, my life, what to do with my gifts,” Perry told Crosswalk Headlines. “And I kind of got this sense from God that I needed to decide what to put my time into -- that’s because my margin was limited [and] my family was growing.”
After her 2018 album, she said she chose to put most of her energy into teaching “because I just feel that’s the thing that makes me happy and gives me joy to be able to open up the Bible and teach it to people.”
“So I just put music on the back burner,” she said.
Then, last year, Perry decided to pause her writing for two years, and “that started to turn my wheels like, ‘Hmm, maybe I do have space, and maybe I do have margin to get back into music again.’”
Reach Records’ Lasanna ACE Harris, who attends Perry’s church, encouraged her to return to the music scene.
“So I prayed about it. I felt like the Lord opened all the doors where it happened,” she said.
Perry’s debut Reach single, First Draft, quickly tallied 150,000 streams on YouTube. She’s in the studio working on her first album, which she hopes to release before the year ends.
In mainstream culture, hip-hop is often known for its explicit lyrics and sexual content. Perry, though, said Christian hip-hop seeks to recapture the genre for Christ.
She acknowledges that decades ago, her childhood church “didn’t think highly of Christian rap.” That, though, has changed.
“I think it’s been good for a long time,” she said of CHH. “You know, whether that’s Cross Movement, whether that’s the Swoopes of our world, the Propagandas, the Odd Thomases, the Hulveys, the Ahas, the Wandes. Who else you got? Like the nobigdyls, the KBs, the Andy Mineos, the Lecraes.”
Such hip-hop artists, she said, have brought musical excellence to the genre and have helped elevate CHH.
“Because excellence isn’t dependent on a generation or an era. Excellence is a gift from God -- we are all made in the image of God,” she said. “And so I think if we employ the gifts that He’s given us, and we care and work diligently to make sure that we’re creating something beautiful, then it’s going to be excellent.”
The body of Christ, she said, should embrace hip-hop as another avenue to spread Truth.
“The genres are all useful and all meaningful and all beautiful in their own way. And so if anything, I’d look at it like how can I make something that has been mishandled -- how can I use that same medium and that same means to glorify the Lord and to talk about our human struggles? Like what would it look like for a hip-hop song to feel like Psalms, to be honest about our humanity, while at the same time stirring up hope? I think that’s what music should be.”
Perry is recording her debut Reach album while continuing to host a podcast with her husband, With the Perrys, and promoting her recently released devotional, Upon Waking. Typically, she said she doesn’t enjoy devotionals because “they come across a bit shallow.”
“[But] I wanted to see what it would be like to create a devotional that was written in the way that I want to read it -- like the Spurgeon devotion or the Oswald Chambers devotional where there was a level of depth, and the Scriptures and Christ was central [and] it wasn’t super sentimental, in a sense,” she told Crosswalk Headlines. “And so Upon Waking is really giving people an avenue by which to get excited about reading the Bible. I look at Upon Waking like this is chips and guacamole. This is the appetizer. This is calamari and marinara sauce. This is not the meal -- the meal is Christ Jesus as seen through His Word. And so let me prep you for the meal so that you can get what you need, which is Him.”
WATCH: Jackie Hill Perry - First Draft (Official Music Video)
Photo Credit: ©Reach Records
Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.