Jamie Grace spreads musical hope, earns Grammy nomination

Although she might be mistaken for a rebellious youth in her '80s-influenced outfit and pink-streaked hair, she loves Jesus, as she'll quickly tell anyone within earshot. She also loves Reba McEntire and Cash, and a country tune spins on the Crosley record player in her slim dorm room.

Growing up in Lithonia, Grace was 9 years old when she began to experience the symptoms of what eventually would be diagnosed as a mild form of Tourette syndrome, a neurological disorder characterized by vocal and facial tics. Although her jaw pops and involuntary tics randomly surface on her face, Grace never let her condition quash her desire to sing.

And in three days, Grace will walk the red carpet at the 54th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles and hope to hear her name called as a winner for her song “Hold Me,” nominated for best contemporary Christian music song.

The possibility of making the cut at the Grammys wasn’t something Grace even considered. In her mind, music’s most prized award was earmarked for names such as Steven Curtis Chapman and Amy Grant and even her new friend "American Idol" finalist and gospel singer Mandisa, who sent Grace a congratulatory text the night the nominees were announced.

“I thought she was joking and I started to text back, ‘That’s so cruel,’ when my cousin said, ‘Just look online.' So I’m scrolling down the list of nominees and I see my name and I start screaming -- like, little girl screaming,” Grace recalled.

The song is the title track from Grace’s EP of the same name, which was released last February on Gotee Records, the label co-created by Christian music veteran TobyMac, who discovered Grace on YouTube.

In September came her full-length debut, “One Song at a Time,” which also features the Grammy-nominated tune, written with her big sister Morgan in mind.

Growing up, Grace and Morgan were inseparable. They were home-schooled through 12th grade and constantly wrote and played music together -- Grace on her first instrument, the drums, which she learned at 13, and Morgan on guitar.

“She and I have always been go-getters,” Grace said. “We’d go pop the guitar case open and go to Little Five Points and play on the sidewalk, or every Thursday night for a year we went and played shows at the Starbucks on [Highway] 138 in Conyers. ‘Probably Wouldn’t Be This Way’ by LeAnn Rimes was the song we’d always pull out, which was completely random for two black girls from Atlanta. We played a Hot Topic at the Mall at Stonecrest. There would be 10 people who showed up but we didn’t care. We were making music.”

The sisters even cut a CD in their dorm room at Point -- a room they shared until Morgan finished school and got married.

Asked what inspired the Grammy-nominated song, Grace recalled a moment shortly before Morgan and her husband Patrick got engaged when the three of them were about to watch a movie together. "I was honestly just feeling lonely and wanted to be comforted,” Grace said.

Grace has always found comfort not only in music, but in God, a faith that came as second nature growing up with a father who is a pastor -- Bishop James Harper at Kingdom City Church in Stone Mountain -- and a mother, Mona, who always instilled Christian principles in her girls.

When Grace was younger and her illness drained her physically and emotionally, she overcame feelings of defeat because of her parents’ unflagging confidence in her.

“The crazy thing is that as much as I remember the pain and the stress, I remember more vividly my dad looking at me and saying, ‘You’re beautiful.’ Or my mom looking at me and saying, ‘God loves you.’ I knew somewhere in me that I still believed it,” Grace said.

Mona Harper and her husband will accompany Grace to the Grammys this weekend, but she admits being unfamiliar with the cachet of the award until Grace was nominated.

“I Googled it on my iPhone and [realized], ‘OK, maybe this is a big deal.’ I was just clueless,” Harper said with a hearty laugh. “I always told both my children that you can have what you want, and this is what she wanted. The most exciting thing for me is knowing that she’s walking out what we’ve taught her, but also that she’s loving what she does.”

Grace will graduate from Point in the spring with a degree in child and youth development and, along with touring to promote her music, she wants to pursue a career in acting. But Grace’s pressing goal at the moment is “to share a message of resilience, whether it’s through music or acting. I want to share this message of hope,” she said.

When talk returns to her Grammy nomination, the vivacious Grace hugs her knees and offers more honesty.

“Even if I don’t win this Grammy and I’m a one-hit wonder,” she said, “I’m gonna keep doing music. If it means going back to my roots and going downtown to play guitar so I can make 20 bucks to go to the movies, I’m gonna do it because I love doing it. But to do it on this scale? That’s something not a lot of college seniors get to do.”