I didn’t know Ruth Coleman. I didn’t grow up hearing her name, and no one told me to go looking for her. But I heard her voice. And it wouldn’t let me go.
There’s a song on the 1973 He’s Able album recorded by the Peoples Temple Choir called “Something Got a Hold of Me.” When I first listened to it, I didn’t expect much more than another gospel track from a time and group too often overshadowed by tragedy. But then she started singing.
I don’t know how to explain what happened in that moment except to say this: I felt her. The strength. The pain. The praise. The years. The life. Her voice didn’t sound trained or styled for performance. It sounded lived-in. Raw, real, and utterly human. It was the sound of a woman who had endured and still had something in her worth lifting up.
I couldn’t let it go. I needed to know who she was. And not just in passing. I needed her name. Her story. Recognition. Because a voice that powerful shouldn’t remain anonymous. She wasn’t just another soloist on an old recording. She was someone who gave a piece of herself in that moment, and I wanted to honor that.
Eventually, after digging through podcasts, archives, and databases, I found her: Ruth Virginia Coleman, born January 3, 1920, in Mississippi. She was approximately 53 when she recorded that track and 58 when she died in Jonestown. Her name was no longer lost to me. When I visited her memorial page, I saw her face. There are a couple of photos. One smiling. One more formal. Both reminded me: this was a real person, not just a voice on tape, but a woman who lived and gave and was taken.
And maybe it hits me harder because I’m from the South, too. I was born just four years before Ruth passed. I know that world, not as history, but as reality. The South she was born into was the South that shaped my grandparents, my parents, and me. I’ve lived with racism. I’ve seen what it does, how it limits, erases, pressures, and isolates. Ruth’s voice held all of that for me. It felt like survival wrapped in praise. Like the burden of being overlooked yet still rising to be heard.
I think about what it meant to be a Black woman with a voice in that world. And I think about how she used it, not to impress, but to testify. Ruth Coleman didn’t sound like someone trying to prove anything. She sounded like someone who knew who she was.
What I felt in Ruth’s voice wasn’t just music. It was memory. It was resistance. It was spirit. It was the kind of sound that plants itself in your chest and stays there. Every time I hear her, I feel it again, that deep, wordless understanding that some voices are too full of truth to ever be forgotten.
This reflection is for her, but also for everyone like her-those whose names were buried, whose stories weren’t told, but who left behind something that still lives, still speaks, still matters.
Ruth Coleman, you were not just another voice. You were the voice. And I’m still listening. You are heard and you are remembered.
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Editor’s Note: Ruth Coleman appears as lead vocalist on “Something Got a Hold of Me” on Transmissions from Jonestown, Episode 17: “He’s Able,” which features an interview with the album’s producer, Jack Arnold Beam.
(Karen Middleton is a Senior Operations Manager in the customer care industry and an amateur writer. Though she has no personal connection to Peoples Temple, she was drawn in by the music—both the Peoples Temple Choir and the Jonestown Express—and moved by the emotional depth, spirit, and humanity it revealed. That connection led her to look more closely at the lives behind the voices. Her writing reflects a desire to honor those often overlooked and to engage with their stories through compassion, not sensationalism.)