‘God knows my heart’
After viral fame, Leslie Jordan made a gospel album
In TV Horror Kat” early 1967 roles — brush Story” — actor on decades “Will with and Leslie & show now Grace,” before Jordan Fox’s business “American he “Call had landed as Me an a member Choir. • of Jordan the Chattanooga was 12 when Boys the group traveled to Montreal for the
“Expo 67” world’s fair, where they sang for Charles de Gaulle. • “That’s my only musical experience,” he tells
The Tennessean with a laugh. “And I was never given a solo — so I gave myself solos!”
53 years later, Jordan once again decided to make himself the star of his own show. It was one of the best career moves he’s ever made.
In the early days of the pandemic, the Los Angeles resident was back in his native Chattanooga to be close to family. To combat boredom, he posted videos on Instagram, holding his phone inches away from his face to share candid and hilarious memories of his southern upbringing, tales from Hollywood and anything else that popped into his head.
It turned out to be just what a nation in lockdown needed. Soon, a 4-foot-11, 65-year-old gay man with an endearing southern drawl was social media’s newest sensation. Jordan now has nearly 6 million followers on Instagram. A tidal wave of opportunities have come his way, and he suddenly has the leverage to do, seemingly, whatever he wants.
That’s how Leslie Jordan ended up with his own gospel album.
His recording debut is called “Company’s Comin’,” and it finds him singing the hymns of his youth with an incredible array of duet partners. Dolly Parton, Eddie Vedder, Tanya Tucker, Chris and Morgane Stapleton, Brandi Carlile, Ashley McBryde, T.J. Osborne, Charlie Worsham and Katie Pruitt all join him on the album, which was largely made on Nashville’s Music Row.
“I wanted it to have a sound of everybody just sitting in the living room and saying, ‘ Oh, you remember this old hymn,’ the way my family did,” Jordan says. “My dad would pull out an old baritone ukulele, and my uncle would pull out his banjo, and as kids we’d sit there and sing along. It was wonderful to be able to revisit all those songs that I loved growing up.”
‘Something real about those roots’
And that process of revisiting started months before Jordan went into the studio. Last spring, he started doing “Sunday Mornin’ Hymn Singin’” with his friend, L.A. songwriter and producer Travis Howard. On Sundays, they’d post acoustic performances of Jordan’s favorites — hymns like “Blessed Assurance” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” They even traveled to Nashville to do a live in-studio performance with their friend Danny Myrick, who later coproduced the album with Howard.
Howard and Jordan have been unlikely friends for more than 20 years. They met after Howard saw Jordan in “Southern Baptist Sissies,” a play about growing up gay in a conservative Baptist church.
Howard isn’t gay but, with an upbringing in a Pentecostal church in Georgia, says he “completely identified with the elements of guilt, shame, secretiveness and being the other.”
“And then you find that in your life, there’s something real about those roots. There still is something real about the ideas of forgiveness and believing in something bigger.”
For Jordan, that process began at age 42, when he got sober.
“I had to do a lot of sort of soul searching,” he says. “Like, ‘What do I believe?’ When I would hear those old hymns, I used to have an axe to grind, (thinking), ‘Well, I didn’t feel accepted in organized religion, and so I walked away…’ But you know what? That’s all been put to rest. I know what my beliefs are. God knows my heart. And I’m good, and I do well.”
‘I might sing live with Dolly’
He had to be self-assured as a singer, too — especially as he found himself sharing tracks with some of country music’s most powerful voices. Jordan laughs as he recalls that a major press outlet recently called his voice “capable.” Still, he belts proudly alongside Carlile on “Angel Band,” and leads a call and response with Osborne on “Sweet By and By.” You also hear him become fast friends with fellow East Tennessee native Parton as they harmonize on “Where The Soul Never Dies.”
“We always come back to these old hymns, don’t we?” he says during an interlude.
“There’s just something about it that’s good for the soul,” she responds. “She said that there was a part that she couldn’t quite get right,” Jordan says of their session. “And so she did the harmony herself with herself. And she said, ‘Now when we do this live, we’ll have to get somebody to sing that part.’ And I almost fell on the floor. It never, ever crossed my mind: ‘I might sing live with Dolly.’ I hope it happens. And I hope it happens in Nashville. And I hope it happens on film.”
He might not have to travel for the gig, either. Jordan, who’s rode horses throughout his life, has dreams of owning a small pony farm near Franklin, Tenn.
“If (‘Call Me Kat’) gets a second season, I’m gonna start looking,” he says. “I’ll come out there six months out of the year.”
Music City might be a good place for Jordan, Howard and Myrick to work on another project.
“I had an idea for a musical that we’re still percolating with. I want it to be about a traveling minister, a traveling revivalist. He sets tents up in Kmart parking lots, and he’s just gay as Christmas. His wife is a con artist and they have a son that pretends he’s a deaf mute, and they trot him out and heal him, and then they build the congregation.”
Ambitious? Sure. But 6 million followers later, Leslie Jordan gets to write his own ticket.
“Now everybody has heard stories that I’ve heard for decades,” Howard says. “He’s always been this funny. It’s just that nobody recognized it. And it feels good.”