We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lee (aka – Percy) Mays a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Lee (aka – Percy), thanks for joining us today. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

Actually, my career as an artist began in the early seventies in the genre of Contemporary Christian Music. With the success of the song, “Shine Your Love”, and the success of the album by the same name, I was well on my way to being on a major Christian record label. But things did not develop as I planned. In 1982, I gave up traveling as an artist. I had gotten married and owned a business in Dallas. More than 30 years later, I gradually returned to the music business after I realized in the summer of 2005 that the music from the “Shine Your Love” album had gained popularity worldwide. To my surprise, my self-produced album that was initially released in 1976 had become a vinyl enthusiast collector’s item on internet auction sites. It was in 2012 that I began to ease into performing once again. My performances were not in the United States but in Eastern Europe. The genre was not CCM but smooth jazz. In 2016, I put together a concert tour in the top jazz clubs in Russia. By 2018 and 2019, I was performing my smooth jazz in the best jazz clubs in Moscow, St Petersburg, Siberia, Minsk, Kyiv, Riga, and Rome. My popularity as a concert artist soared in Eastern Europe and Italy until the pandemic in 2020 and the war in Ukraine in February 2022.

Lee (aka – Percy), before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I taught myself to play the piano at the age of 9. My father was the typical hellfire and brimstone Baptist preacher. He asked me to learn to play so that the church could have a pianist. I realized early on that I wasn’t a real fan of some of the black church music that I learned to play. Many of the songs had a sad and bluesy sound to me. Much of the old-time spirituals that were passed on from generation to generation had that sound that instantly transported you into the era of black oppression and slavery. That probably explains why the songs that I wrote starting as a teenager can all be described as “happy jazz”. Contrary to my father’s wishes, when I was in high school, I was listening to the popular music of the sixties and seventies on the radio. My father, who was a strict Baptist fundamentalist, was against me listening to “worldly” music and wouldn’t allow me to attend my junior high and high school dances. But behind his back and whenever I could, I would listen to Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind and Fire, Carole King, The Bee Gees, James Taylor, Chicago, The Fifth Dimension, The Carpenters, Neil Sedaka, and anything that was playing on the Top-40 radio station out of Amarillo, Texas. The music was fresh, upbeat, and fun to listen to. When I was 15, I picked up the acoustic guitar and taught myself how to play. One of the first complete songs that I learned how to play on the guitar was the Ray Stevens hit song, “Everything is Beautiful” (1970).

When I was 18, I wrote “Changes” in my dorm room as a first year student at West Texas A&M University in 1970. The song has been licensed several times to various record companies. In 2010, the Percy Mays “Shine Your Love” album was licensed to Banderia Records, which is an independent label from Seoul, South Korea. In 2018, “Changes” and “Chase Away the Blues” were licensed by IziphoSoul Records from the United Kingdom. Today, all of the songs from the 1976 “Shine Your Love” album are licensed by The Numero Group. My 7-year agreement with The Numero Group was signed in August 2022.

My first career as a performer began when I was in college during the fall of 1970 and ended in 1982. During those years, I was a singer, songwriter, and comedian who performed as a solo artist for churches mostly affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention throughout Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio. There were also a few occasions when I would travel to Assembly of God and Pentecostal churches. Then there were the occasions when I would get booked at national events that were sponsored by the High School Ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ International in Indianapolis and Fort Wayne in Indiana, Orlando, Florida, and Boulder, Colorado. At the events sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ, I would appear on the same program with such popular artists as Amy Grant, Steve Camp, David Meece, and the Jewish Messianic duo, Lamb. Most of the CCC gigs were in schools, colleges, event halls, and even in some prisons and military bases in California, Oklahoma and Texas. As a comedian, I impersonated comedian Bill Cosby and was known as the “Bill Cosby of West Texas”. 

In 1976, I released the Percy Mays “Shine Your Love” album which was recorded at Associated Recording Studios in Oklahoma City. The album received frequent airplay on Christian radio stations in Amarillo, Dallas, Lubbock, Houston, Oklahoma City, and Atlanta. Back in those days, getting airplay on radio stations was a rarity for an artist like myself who produced an album that was self-made and independent. Generally, Chirstian radio stations would play only the music from artists associated with the big-name record labels.

My version of the title song, Percy Mays “Shine Your Love”, was the #1 most requested song on FM radio station KWAS in Amarillo for eight consecutive weeks in the spring of 1976. The song was also recorded by The Cruse Family in 1978 on Canaan Records, a division of Word Records. “Shine Your Love” was one of two singles from the “Transformation” album which won a Dove Award for Best Album of the Year in 1978.

By the early 1980’s, I had gotten married, started a business, and did less traveling because my focus in life had shifted from a life as a musician to a life of maintaining a family.
By 1982, I completely stopped accepting gigs as a contemporary Christian music artist and devoted myself to my business and my family. In 1985, I stopped using my legal first name, “Percy” in my everyday life, and insisted that everyone call me by my legal middle name “Lee”. In all honesty, I never liked my first name.

I honestly never thought that I would return to music as a performer after leaving the business in the early eighties. But due to the internet, the songs from the “Shine Your Love” album had gained popularity over the years. In 2005, I accidentally discovered that the Percy Mays “Shine Your Love” album had become a vinyl record enthusiast collector’s item. The album was listed on several internet auction sites including eBay and Yahoo Japan. I received email messages from vinyl enthusiasts from all over the world requesting a copy of the album.

After the success and the internet popularity of the release of the music by the record label from Seoul, Korea in 2010, I began to contemplate getting back into the music business. But during this time, the genre that I was performing and the songs I was writing were not CCM but smooth jazz. In 2010, I traveled to Almaty, Kazakhstan where I gave my first concert in three decades. To my surprise, the Russian-speaking audience loved my performance. In 2011, I performed a couple of mini-concerts in Kyiv and Kharkov. By 2015 and 2016, I was performing in some of the world’s most prestigious jazz clubs such as Alexey Kozlov Jazz Club in Moscow and JFC Jazz Club in St. Petersburg. I also performed in jazz clubs in Novosibirsk, Kemerovo, Minsk, Riga, Kyiv, and Rome. 

In essence, I had been out of the music business for more than thirty years prior to my success and international travels which started in 2015. All my life I heard in the quote, “follow your dreams”.  I  guess it’s because I had given up on my dreams throughout those 30 years that  my dreams began to follow me.  And it all happened without anyone’s prediction – even my own. 

Update on August 15, 2023:  I’ve just been booked to return to Kyiv, Ukraine for two nights at the end of November 2023.  I will also travel to Italy and Denmark for an end-of-the-year European concert tour. 

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

The question is can I share a story throughout my journey that illustrates my resilience. Yes, I can share several stories. I became a member of the First Baptist Church in Canyon, Texas when I was a college student at West Texas A&M University in the early seventies. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the Southern Baptist Convention had a history since it was founded in 1845 of supporting slavery and segregation. Although I was a young Black man who was a member of a wonderful white church community, many Black folks did not always feel welcomed in Southern Baptist churches.

During the early days of my musical career, I was sort of a traveling musical evangelist. The songs that I performed were of a spiritual nature, even though they had somewhat of a commercial sound. My main audiences during these years were mostly Southern Baptist churches, Baptist Student Unions on public and private colleges, Baptist youth retreats and camps, after football game fellowships, etc.

I could have quit performing my music in Southern Baptist churches in the mid-seventies on a Sunday night after I had driven all the way from Amarillo, Texas to a small church in Kentucky. It was on that Sunday night after I had performed a full concert that I was told by the pastor that my pay would be a hamburger from the local burger joint.

I could have also stopped performing my music in the early seventies on the Sunday after I had been invited to perform at the First Baptist Church in the small Texas South Plains town of Levelland, Texas. Levelland is 30 miles west of Lubbock. I was invited by the youth pastor who was a friend from my hometown of Hereford, Texas. On the Saturday night prior to my visiting the entire Sunday congregation of the all white church, I had performed for the youth group of about 100 junior high and high school students. As usual, the event went well with all of the young people enjoying my performance. But the next Sunday morning during the church services, I felt an acute strangeness in the air. Throughout my early career as a music evangelist, it was a regular occurrence for me to minister to the entire church by singing a song or two on Sunday morning, especially if I had performed for the youth group on the previous night. It was an opportunity for me to sing a song or two for the entire congregation so that the parents of the youth could see and hear me as well. But on this particular Sunday morning, I wasn’t even recognized as a visitor – let alone asked to sing a special song or two. I later found out from my friend that the reason I was shunned that Sunday morning was because I was the first Black person to ever walk into the First Baptist Church in Levelland. On that Sunday morning, it wasn’t time for a Black man to be recognized in that church because some folks were not quite ready to see racial integration.

In 1978, I was asked to perform at a youth retreat for a Baptist church in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Over the years, the city of Muskogee had a history of racial problems. I had started dating a lady who would eventually become my wife named Robyn. Robyn is a white girl whom I had met at West Texas A&M and was from my hometown of Hereford, Texas. Prior to my leaving for the event from Oklahoma City to Muskogee, I failed to mention to the youth pastor that I would be bringing Robyn with me to the youth retreat. To me, it wasn’t a big deal. But to the youth pastor, the church deacons, the parents, and some of the students, it was a big deal. The drama began upon my arrival in the church’s parking lot. Robyn was asked to stay in the car while I went inside to talk to the deacons and other decision-makers of the church. It was expressed to me that I should not have brought my girlfriend to the church and that my appearance at the church function had to be cancelled. The young people were told of the decision. I remember seeing and hearing the cries of some of the young people crying about the decision to cancel the event. I could have quit performing my music due to the attitudes on interracial dating by those people in the church. But my resilience and my resolve were strong because by this time, I had already seen how much my music had blessed and touched the lives of people.

In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention offered a formal apology to the world for their history of slaveholding and “deep racism”.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Social media has been quite instrumental in building my audiences, especially overseas. Previously I have mentioned that I’ve performed in the top jazz clubs in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Latvia. These countries are primarily Russian-speaking. I have been able to book my own concerts even though I cannot speak the Russian language. I depend quite heavily on Google Translate. With the help of this app, I was able to book myself to do concerts in Eastern Europe from 2015 until 2022. I have been communicating with Russian-speaking people since 2008. In addition to having 7 Facebook accounts and two Instagram accounts, I also have two Russian-speaking social media accounts. The first social media site is called, Контакт (Contact) at VK.com. It can be best described as Facebook for Russian-speaking people. The second social media site is Одноклассники (Classmates) at OK.RU. I have seen my presence on social media grow tremendously overseas as a result of having these two sites. Unfortunately, since Russia’s war in Ukraine was launched on February 24, 2022, I no longer have a strong presence on these social media sites.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.reverbnation.com/leemays
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leemaysmusic/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100012505868630
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/leemaysmusic44
• Other: https://vk.com/leemays

Image Credits
Photos 214706.jpg, 427618.jpg, 997086.jpg, 028673jpg are by Alan Mercer. Photo 225025 by Volodymyr Osipenko. Photo 394302 by Tatiana Shcherbakova. Photo 102271 by Keith Hunter. The photo in gold by Caribbean Club Kyiv, Ukraine.