Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Essie Hill, center, sings with the choir of Central Baptist Church in the Hill District on a recent Sunday. "Singing is my ministry," Mrs. Hill, 86, says. View an audio slideshow profiling the gospel singer by clicking the image below: Listen In: Two songs from Essie Hill's CD "Essie Hill Sings Stories of the Gospel." "Traveling Shoes" "May the Work I've Done"

The Community House Church was packed for the tiny woman who came to sing one evening in late March. It would be the North Side audience's introduction to Essie Hill.

She poked with her cane to the front of the house, took her position beside guitarist Mani Stokes and set her cane down.

As she started to sing, her hip slid to one side. She held the mike like someone who knows how to hold one. She cocked her head and released a voice that acted on the crowd like a kickball to the stomach. Whoosh went the air. Mouths dropped open. With the first song, Sister Essie Hill had already spread her ministry and her obscure legend.

Essie Hill, at 86, is a living landmark at Central Baptist Church in the Hill District, and she is known by congregations for whom she has been a guest soloist. But outside those venues, her name does not resonate, and it should; thus this story.

She was a middle child of 10 and a skinny 16-year-old when she came to Pittsburgh on a Greyhound bus from Tifton, Ga. She carried a cardboard-box suitcase tied with string and was no doubt singing in her mind the whole way.

"I sing in my mind more than I sing out loud," she said. "I wake up at night singing in my mind. I started singing at the age of 7 and received Christ at the age of 12. Singing is my ministry."

She lived for a year with a sister at 102 Fullerton St., its footprint now deep under the Mellon Arena. She had expected to see less prejudice here and was surprised that black people were restricted in so many places.

"I can't explain why they brought us here from Africa. That's beyond my jurisdiction," she said. "But I know God wants us all to be kind to one another."

Back then, black children in Tifton could not go beyond 10th grade, which was one reason she came north. Besides, she said, "there was no work there that paid any kind of money. I always wanted to be a schoolteacher, but my mom didn't have the money to send me" to school.

She became a nanny and took night classes to finish high school. She met and married William Buford Hill, a steelworker, at age 17.

"This young man saw this crazy country girl that he thought was all right and he grabbed me up and he married me and we were married for 43 years and 11 months. He died in 1980, and I never married again."

They had one son, Eddie, who died 10 years ago.

		Upcoming performances by Essie Hill Essie Hill will present a concert at Vintage, a senior center in East Liberty, 401 N. Highland Ave, at 12:30 p.m. tomorrow. Admission is $3. Saturday, she and guitarist Mani Stokes will open for the Spirit-Filled Music Ministry at Greensburg's St. Clair Park, Maple Avenue and Otterman Street, from 6 to 6:45 p.m.

In 1959, she got work on the serving line in the cafeteria at Presbyterian Hospital -- now part of UPMC -- and always got to work early. She said she worked in such a way that others said, "'Why are you running around like you're afraid you're going to lose your job?' I wasn't afraid of nothing," she said, "but something was pushing me.

"When the cafeteria manager left, the boss gave me the job." It was elating to be the first black manager, "the first black anything," she said. But a lot of her co-workers had never moved up and resented her doubly because of her race. She recalls her boss telling her, "You've been working hard, you're getting this job. So go ahead and put on your white dress and walk around here and do what you're supposed to do."

"I worked there 23 years and 11 months. I had 30-some employees I supervised. I hired, I fired, I gave raises."

The pay allowed her to indulge a little the desire that had gone wanting as a child who had two dresses. Reed-thin and well-coiffed, Mrs. Hill is a fashion plate when she goes out, but she says she has never had much of a social life. "Mostly what I know is church."

She met her longtime friend Eleanor Kennedy when they volunteered in Central Baptist's soup kitchen.

"We laugh a lot, talk about our grandchildren," said Mrs. Kennedy. Mrs. Hill has four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. "If I feel low in the morning, I can call her and uplift my spirits, and I think I do the same for her. We go on trips and to restaurants together. I'm glad she's my friend."

Lusandris Critten, Mrs. Hill's niece, calls her, "the best thing that ever happened to me since my mother. She is always there and never asks for anything in return. My daughter was killed, and we had no insurance. My aunt paid for the whole funeral. We paid her back. We had to pay monthly, but I know she needs every penny she can scrape up."

Sister Fidelis McDonough coordinates outreach for Mercy Neighborhood Ministries and found Mrs. Hill through other neighborhood women. "I try to contact elderly women to see if they need assistance," she said. "She became involved in the West Oakland Women's Outreach. We call ourselves the WOWOs.

"I expected this little woman, possibly frail, and here I am meeting this very spirited woman, always dressed for the occasion. Essie is often the person who leads the [WOWOs] sessions with a song that's a prayer. Her hymns are always right, and the women love them, and sometimes they sing along. She has never lost her ability to lead. When she is ill, she will tell you she is ill, but when you see her, she looks marvelous. What a spirit. She's a blessing, and I'd say she makes West Oakland very special."

In the 1960s, Mrs. Hill soloed on two bills with Mahalia Jackson at Forbes Field and has traveled with quartets and choirs through the years, but her solos and her concerts had tapered off before the release of her first CD last year.

Mani Stokes, a blues guitarist and accompanist at Central Baptist helped raise the $700 -- most of it committed by the church's pastor, the Rev. Victor J. Grigsby -- to produce a CD of 11 songs last year, "Essie Hill Sings Songs of the Gospel."

Most of the songs have never been recorded or listed for copyright, he said, "which makes them priceless. And Miss Essie is a diamond.

"Like the great blues singers, she never does a song the same way twice. When you're accompanying her, you have to be on your toes. That night [of the North Side concert], I prayed, 'Please let some people show up for this because she really needs this.' And then I saw all of you out there and was just so glad for her."

He said he had the same reaction at his own introduction to Mrs. Hill.

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Old photographs document Essie Hill's life and participation in gospel choir singing. Click photo for larger image.

"She was singing in the choir and I was like, 'Wow. Who is that?' They said 'That's Miss Essie,' and I said, 'She's great. She should be recording.'

"She's from the original school, you know? You figure around the time she was born, there were people still alive who had been slaves, and she was from Georgia. With all those influences -- what they called 'Negro spirituals,' and from spirituals came blues -- she was on the front lines.

"I always tell her, 'Miss Essie, if we could have met 50 years ago and done that CD, you'd be famous now."

She says she never gave a thought to being famous: "All I know is I sing," she said. "I'm singing and serving the Lord and doing my best."

One of the songs on her CD, "Traveling Shoes," suggests rap, but in concert, her version is unmistakable, rapturous rap. The night she sang on the North Side, the crowd was doing some astonished grinning and wiggling in their seats to the beat.

"The first time I rapped that song [in the youth program] at church, the kids went crazy," she said. "I got up there and I rapped that song, and I've been rapping it ever since. I sing along with the radio, too, like Al Green songs." She drifts into several bars of "Let's Stay Together," then stops, abruptly. "But I never detoured away from the church. When I sing, something comes over me like I'm being anointed. He lifts my burden."

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Essie Hill greets other members of Central Baptist Church in the Hill District on a recent Sunday. Click photo for larger image