On stage at Nashville Pride festival on a sweltering June afternoon, Big Freedia is her usual boisterously commanding self. She invites volunteers and the sign-language interpreter to join her and her dancers in getting down to bounce music, the relentlessly kinetic style of hip-hop for which she has become a figurehead in her native New Orleans. Then she pauses for a brief heart-to-heart with the audience. “I don’t know if y’all know this, but I started in the church,” she says.
Big Freedia’s forthcoming album, Pressing Onward, is a gospel record and she is keen to stress that she isn’t abandoning her core audience. The gay, gender-fluid rapper and reality TV star exhorts every kind of body to shake it and is unequivocal about her support for all marginalised people; her reputation led Beyoncé and Drake to sample her on some of their most successful tracks. “This album is for us,” she emphasises. “It is for people who are LGBTQ and who love God.”
When the beat of a new song, Take My Hand, kicks into double time, just the way a sanctified rhythm section would in church, she brings gospel catharsis to queer people in the same southern state where the US supreme court recently upheld a ban on transgender youth healthcare, at a time when LGBTQ+ progress across the US is meeting with forceful religious pushback.
The week after, Big Freedia logs on to our video call to talk gospel. “It’s already an ass revival when they come to a Big Freedia show,” she says, referring to the mass twerking her shows inspire. “And now they’re coming to a Big Freedia gospel revival.”
In one sense, it’s a superficial distinction. Back in the church choir of Big Freedia’s youth, she moved people to ecstatic dance: “We would have lots of clapping, stomping of the feet, choreographed dancing that we would do in our robes.” The young singer, who back then could hit soprano range, showed such dedication and promise that the choir’s director made her their assistant. By high school, Big Freedia was leading ensembles and envisioned that as her future. “I thought I was going to be a famous choir director and that I was gonna be singing with choirs all around the world.”
Big Freedia says she grew up feeling welcomed by the working-class Black Baptist congregation that knew her as Freddie Ross Jr – so much so that she used its name as the title of her new album. “From the first time I walked in the doors, they put their arms around me and gave me the biggest hug,” she says. “And they knew I was a young gay boy. I was loud and proud, even as a kid. We didn’t have those moments of the pastor talking about: ‘God doesn’t love gay folks.’ God loved us all.”
She was also becoming part of a circle of rappers that were making boastful, bass-heavy New Orleans club music a vehicle for their party-starting queer and gender-expansive personae. The bounce scene beckoned. Big Freedia received assurance from her mum and other church folk that pursuing it wouldn’t be sacrilegious, as long as she maintained her relationship with God – and she lets it be known, loudly and often, that she has. Before she took the stage at Pride, her team huddled and someone offered a prayer: “God give Freedia the supernatural strength, in the name of Jesus, from the top of her head to the soles of her feet.”
Big Freedia certainly isn’t the first member of the LGBTQ+ community to contribute to the gospel canon. That lineage might be more widely acknowledged if generations of the music’s pioneers hadn’t been required to live closeted lives. “Once you start historicising, you figure out that so much of what is sung in churches was created by, and continues to be created by, queer folks,” says Ashon Crawley, a religious studies scholar and cultural critic who draws on insight he gained as a young, Black, queer Pentecostal church musician.
In her youth, Big Freedia recorded with the New Orleans Gospel Soul Children choir, but she had never contemplated her own gospel project until a 2024 session yielded the spiritually ebullient dance track Celebration. “God put it on my heart that this is what I need to do,” she says. Big Freedia made clear to potential co-writers that she still wanted her audacious swagger and compassion to come through and that she wasn’t out to convert anyone. “I’m representing for the LGBTQ community,” she told them. “So when they come here, the door is bust wide open and there is no judgment and you have this moment to lose it in the spirit.”
Parson James, a Nashville-based pop artist who is queer and biracial, helped her craft some of the hooks. He had dealt with the homophobia of his small-town South Carolina congregation by distancing himself from the church and its music, so he was wary of returning to gospel, but he put his trust in Big Freedia’s intentions. “Doing it with someone who’s so confident – you can’t tell her shit – it just was amazing.”
Pressing Onward has ample pop accessibility: over an 808 drum machine, Sunday Best blends hip-hop fashion flexes and brags about Black church finery. But the album is also lifted by unmistakable gospel elements: warm, reverberant eruptions of Hammond B3 organ; the taut, powerful unison of mass choir singing. Crawley sees Big Freedia’s reclamation of these traditions as potentially subversive. “It demonstrates to the church: your excluding of us doesn’t have to be the end of our story; we find community with one another in ways that you both taught us how to do and in ways you could not anticipate. So perhaps you should pay more attention to the very thing that you have excluded.”
Big Freedia initially planned to release Pressing Onward in June’s Pride month, but in May her longtime partner, Devon Hurst, died unexpectedly of diabetes complications. She insisted on directing the choir at his funeral. The day before our interview, she closed on the house they had planned to buy together. “My whole life has just changed within this last month,” she says. “It has been an emotional rollercoaster, all the things that me and him had planned and the things we were doing and working on. And now I’m doing all these things by myself.”
Even in her profound grief, she was willing to push the album release back only by a month. “I need it more than anybody,” she says. “And I know if I need it, there’s other people out there in the world that need it. There’s always someone who’s depressed or going through a hard time. There is always someone who’s fighting who they are, or fighting against a community of people that don’t accept who they are. This album is not just for me – it’s for the world.”
