The Seventh-day Adventist community in Jamaica is still rejoicing after Erica Lumsden, a student at the Northern Caribbean University (NCU) and member of the Claremont Seventh-day Adventist Church in St. Mary, won the 2021 National Gospel Star Song Competition.
Lumsden, an 18-year-old second-year communication student at NCU, topped 10 finalists in a four-week competition, which was televised on free-for-air television. The program featured musical performances from themes such as reggae/dancehall, gospel, traditional and throwback gospel.
“One of the reasons for entering the competition is that my father, Pastor Kanhai Lumsden, was two points away from death last year, so I was at a different place in my life,” said Lumsden. Her father is not fully recovered. “I was thinking outside the box, because I was really living outside the box as a pastor’s kid,” she explained.
Erica Lumsden, a Seventh-day Adventist student at Northern Caribbean University in Mandeville, Jamaica performs “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” before a televised broadcast on July 12, 2021. Lumsden was among 10 finalists who competed for the title of Jamaica’s National Gospel Star. She won the competition after a four-week final championship race on Aug. 1, 2021. [Screenshot Photo from Jamaica National Gospel Star Competition/YouTube]
The father’s health scare caused her to become more responsible and more serious about life, she said. She felt that God was more personal with her family then than at any other time. One of several songs she sang in the competition was “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.”
The Gospel Star Competition, which replaces the annual Jamaica Gospel Song competition, had the contestants performing cover songs instead of original songs, ending with the finale on Aug. 1, 2021.
“Musically I knew I could go in any direction when it came to musical genres, and though I did not know at the outset that we would have to present the gospel in song in several categories of genres, including reggae/dancehall, and traditional forms, I was challenged because these were musical forms I never did before,” said Lumsden. “My ability to sing was a gift from the Lord as an answer to my prayer many years before.”
The winner was decided by votes from the public, which made up 50 percent of the total, with the other 50 percent taken from the opinion of three judges who were selected from Jamaica’s music industry.
