In 2020, Virginia policeman, Mervin Mayo, became a viral sensation when his performance of a Marvin Sapp song garnered over a million Facebook views, a CNN Headline news segment and a call from Tyscot Records offering him a record deal. Since that time, Mervin Mayo has become one of the best-streamed new artists on the gospel scene due to his heartfelt, old-school R&B styled gospel songs such as “In This Place,” “I’m Healing” and “God Did It.” Mayo grew up in Richmond, Virginia’s tough Creighton Court housing projects. “There was a lot of drugs and a lot of killing around me. I could be out sitting on the porch, and somebody was just shot down the street. I just thought that was normal.
A now-retired police officer, Curtis Simmons, became a role model to Mayo and other kids in the neighborhood during his youth. “There was an organization called the Police Athletic League,” he recalls. “They would pick people up from the neighborhood and take us to basketball games, trips outside of the neighborhood. Curtis kept me out of trouble. He spent a lot of time with me, and I said if I ever become a police officer, I want to do for others what he did for me.” After some time as a forklift driver, Mayo finally joined the police department in 2005. He faced almost every imaginable hazard. “I even had a guy pull a pitchfork on me,” he recalls. “I worked the streets 3 years and then I applied to work with the youth in the schools. It‘s not a school for bad kids but a school for kids who made bad decisions. They can relate to me because I’ve been where they are. I want to stop that school-to-prison pipeline. I’m here to make things better.” Aside from mentoring kids, Mayo’s other passion has always been music. He grew up singing in church and later with an R&B group, CHARM (Cool, Handsome, Attractive, Romantic, Men) circa 1991-1997. Later, he formed the gospel group, CHANGED, which performed on bills with some of gospel’s biggest names such as Yolanda Adams and Rance Allen. In 2020, he was at his church singing Marvin Sapp’s “The Best in Me” and posted it on Facebook. In days, the video had gone viral, and the post eventually garnered a million views. As a result, an executive from Tyscot Records spotted him, called him up and signed him to a recording deal. The rest is history. Mayo’s combination of old school R&B rhythms with gospel messaging have made him an instant success on music platforms such as Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, TIDAL and YouTube. Within two years, his debut Tyscot album God Did It has earned him over 44 million digital streams and over 46 million TikTok views. Among the fan favorites are the ballad “In This Place,” the inspiring “I’m Healing” and the rocker, “God Did It.” As he prepares to release his sophomore Tyscot album, Mayo will release the new single “The Air I Breathe” in the summer of 2025.
