Joyce Bryant, internationally noted nightclub and opera singer with a four-octave range, had a Seventh-day Adventist background. After a meteoric rise to fame as a nightclub singer in the late 1940s, she had a conversion experience in 1955 and then worked in the church for the rest of the decade, singing in evangelistic meetings and serving as a Bible worker. She left the church in the 1960s and eventually resumed singing in nightclubs until her retirement.

Joyce was born in Oakland, California, and raised in San Francisco, the oldest of eight children. Her mother was a churchgoing Adventist and her father a railroad chef who was seldom at home. Following an unconsummated marriage at age fourteen, she moved to Los Angeles to live with cousins.

Bryant began singing at clubs in the Los Angeles area in the late 1940s. She soon gained a reputation for outrageous behavior and provocative clothing, colored her hair with silver radiator paint, and became known as the "bronze bombshell," the "black Marilyn Monroe."

She was earning as much as $150,000 a year, had been featured in a 1953 issue of Life magazine, and was appearing regularly in African-American magazines when, deeply troubled about her image and the sordidness of the nightclub scene, she abruptly joined the Adventist church in 1955. She enrolled at Oakwood College, now University, that fall. Ebony, the most widely circulated African-American magazine in the U.S., ran a five-page feature article on her conversion in its May 1956 issue titled "The New World of Joyce Bryant." According to the church's primary publication, Review and Herald, the piece accurately described the church's doctrines and pictured her present life on campus in a favorable light.

In 1957, Bryant became a Bible instructor in the Allegheny Conference, a regional black conference, initially working in related Washington, D.C., area churches. In 1958, she and Richard Penniman (Little Richard), a recently converted pop music superstar, worked with E. E. Cleveland, famed black evangelist, in a twelve-week series in Washington, D.C. The write-up about that event in the September 11, 1958, Review and Herald, related the following:

Bryant left the church shortly after this because of false accusations about her and, following study with a voice teacher at Howard University, worked in touring foreign opera companies, singing music in the classical repertoire in the 1960s, before returning to the nightclub scene and singing on cruise ships. The behavior, dress, and appearance associated with her earlier days of singing were discarded, however, as she resumed singing in these venues.

Although never as famous as Eartha Kitt and Dorothy Dandridge, noted popular black singers, Bryant because of her talent was, like them, able to help break racial barriers, gaining access to the most prominent stages in that area of popular music performance. Along the way, she endured her share of indignities, including being burned in effigy when she stayed and sang in a Miami hotel. Martin Luther King, Jr., nationally famous civil rights pioneer, particularly enjoyed her singing and, following Sunday services, she would often join King and his family for dinner at an Atlanta, Georgia, restaurant.

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