Frye grew up in Aberdeen, moved to Nashville, Tenn., and sang in clubs for years. But he found something missing at every plateau and reevaluated his life — especially after the murder of one of his friends.
“At eight years of age, I’d stand in front of a mirror with a string on a stick, pretending I was playing a guitar,” says Frye.
His parents bought him a snare drum when he was a fifth-grader. His brother Sammy got a guitar.
“We played for some ladies Mother invited over. That was our first performance,” says Frye, 47, the thin, wiry, middle brother of three sons born to Joan and Sam Frye of Aberdeen. Sammy, one year older than Frye, is presently a youth pastor at Whispering Pines’ Yates-Thagard Baptist Church; Dale, four years younger, is a kickboxing champion who lives in Aberdeen,
When he was 13, his mother gave him a tract about a 12-year old boy who became a Christian.
“I read it and said, ‘Momma, I’d like to do this,’” recalls Frye. “She called our pastor, and he came. I remember being scared and crying, but I don’t remember praying. I was baptized, but there was no change in me. I soon stopped attending church.”
During his high school years, Frye sang and played guitar with bands and worked for the Lob-Steer Inn restaurant. He left home at 17, but finished Pinecrest High in 1973 while living with a buddy.
He studied psychology at Sandhills Community College for a year and a half.
“But I argued with some teachers and quit,” he says.
Frye then worked three years for Hannon Electric while playing at parties and bars, often traveling to Greenville and Raleigh to perform, return, and work the next day. After quitting his day job, he toured as a solo artist.
“My lifestyle took me into drugs and alcohol,” says Frye. “I found myself in places and situations that took me a long way from the things I had been taught as a boy.”
After performing in Winston-Salem one Saturday night, Frye headed home on Sunday morning. Along the way, he pulled into a church parking lot, walked into the sanctuary, and sat down in a back pew. After the service, the pastor sat down beside Frye and asked, “Son, can I help you?”
“I ran out,” says Frye.
After two years as a solo performer, Frye moved to Raleigh and formed “Bruce Frye and the Lonely Rider Band.” They played East Coast clubs and festivals, “making a good living doing country-rock.”
In 1990, Frye moved to Nashville, formed a band, and played the city’s nightspots — including the famous Bluebird Café.
He formed “The Rooster and Roadrunner Show,” a music/comedy act with comedian Todd Yohn. They played Hawaii for two weeks and toured the Southeast for two years, but Yohn’s career took a different turn, and Frye returned to singing, songwriting and trying to pay bills.
“When Todd left, I also broke up with a girl I dated for five years. I felt alone,” says Frye. “I said, ‘Lord, I thought the reason you gave me talent was for me to be a star. If that’s not true, why am I here?’”
He bought and began reading a Bible and called his brother Sammy for encouragement.
Frye often sat in with the band at Skull’s Rainbow Club, a late-night club on Printer’s Alley in Nashville.
“In January 1998, the owner of that club, a friend of mine, was brutally murdered,” says Frye. “At the funeral, a priest said, ‘Our friend wasn’t a religious person, but he did nice things for a lot of people.’ I wondered where my friend was and where I was going if I died.”
After playing at a club one night, Frye walked nearby to Skull’s Rainbow Club. Police still had the building roped off.
“I stood at the club door and started weeping,” says Frye. “I looked down the street. Other clubs were open and the music was loud. I wondered, ‘What’s wrong with me?’”
Soon after a young fiddle player happened to invite him to church, and Frye began attending Bible studies.
One night after seeing a movie about a morally weak preacher, Frye felt troubled.
“I went home and told the Lord, ‘I’m tired. I don’t want to think about religion tonight.’ I decided to watch a video — it was a feel-good movie where you fall in love with the character, and then he dies.”
When the video ended, Frye stared at the blank screen and began weeping, he says.
“I dropped to my knees bedside my bed and said, ‘Lord, I don’t understand it all, but I’m miserable, and I need you. Please forgive me for everything I’ve done that displeased you. And from this day, I’ll go anywhere you want me to go and do anything you want me to do.’ I prayed a long time before I crawled into bed and wrote, ‘I gave my life to Christ at 12:30 a.m., March 10, 1998.’”
He took a job with Beacon Technologies, a Nashville communications company managed by a Christian friend. Frye continued his club schedule for only a few months, honoring contracts but sharing his faith while performing.
He attended Two Rivers Baptist Church, across from the Opryland Hotel, but he visited Trinity Baptist, a new church about 20 miles from Nashville in Franklin, and saw these words in the church’s brochure: “We are about learning and studying the word of God. We are not about entertainment.”
“God couldn’t have hit me any harder with a baseball bat,” says Frye, who joined the church. Within weeks, his job took him to Cleveland, Tenn., where he helped with Shenandoah Baptist Church Boys’ Ranch. He returned to the Franklin church on weekends and helped build its worship facility.
On a Sandhills visit, Frye met Vicki Inman at Yates-Thagard Baptist Church. They married on Sept. 4, 1999, and Frye began working with McDaniel Electric Company in January 2000.
Frye has produced several CDs — “That Was Me” came after his religious conversion — and he and Sammy plan to sing together on a CD they want to call “Brothers Twice.”
“On April 25, I left my job to go into fulltime ministry—giving my testimony, preaching, and singing,” says Frye. “One of my favorite verses is Philippians 3:13. In that verse, the Apostle Paul says: ‘Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.’”
Steve Crain is a freelance writer who often does articles for The Pilot’s religion page.
