The Straight and Narrow Gospel Choir

In this choir, they sing for their lives.   

That man taking the solo once was a homeless heroin addict selling water bottles to commuters outside the Holland Tunnel for drug money. That woman in the front row was addicted before she became a mother at 17. The woman beside her was brought back by police officers from an overdose five months ago.

Hold on, they sing, hold on. Things are gonna get easier. 

The Straight & Narrow Gospel Choir, which performs regularly at Catholic churches and schools around North Jersey, is the liveliest and most public face of Straight & Narrow Inc., the Catholic agency named for the intersection of two streets in Paterson where most of its drug-treatment programs are located.

Each member is recovering from some form of addiction. Each is somewhere on the path from addiction to sobriety.  

That soloist, Irv DeBois, now has an apartment, a car and a good job. The young mother is getting ready to move from residential treatment to a halfway house and is studying for her high school equivalency exam. The woman whose overdose was reversed by Narcan, an opioid antidote, is progressing in treatment.

 

As America confronts its crisis of opioid addiction and overdose deaths, a multitude of medical, psychological, spiritual and legal tools are being deployed. The music of a gospel choir may seem an unlikely vehicle for recovery.

But ultimately, the struggle with addiction is individual and personal — engaged case by case, life by life. Among these singers, the soul-filling music has helped turn around once-hellish lives.   

Their robes — brightened at the shoulders by yellow kente cloth — are identical. But each chorister has a unique story. 

Some have been in recovery for 30 days, others for 30 years. Some have graduated from Bergen County’s finest high schools, and others are products of jails and the streets. They are young and old; black, white and brown; Catholic and non-Catholic. 

They’ve hurt people and brought themselves shame and regret. Some have detoxed, rehabbed and relapsed — once, twice, eight times. They have lost mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers to overdoses, children to foster care, and years of their lives to addiction. 

And yet they sing.   
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