Janet Mead

To everyone's surprise, Sister Janet Mead hit the number four position on Billboard's Pop Chart April 13, 1974 with the angelic "The Lord's Prayer." The Adelaide, South Australia native, born in 1938, formed a group called the Rock Band when she was 17 to provide music for the weekly mass at the local cathedral. A Sister of Mercy, Sister Janet Mead's goal was to make contemporary Mass music available for everyone to understand and enjoy. In 1973 she started making records for churches and schools, but Festival Records detected a wider appeal for her lovely voice and recorded the soon-to-be hit on the B-side of a Donovan song. Disk jockeys flipped it and "The Lord's Prayer" became so popular that A&M Records distributed the record worldwide to more than 31 countries. It became the first Australian record to go gold, selling more than a million copies in the United States, and two million worldwide. She donated all the royalties from the sales to charity. Sister Mead crept into the States charts once more with "Take My Hand," but never appeared again. She continued to record for Festival Records, although a third album was shelved as she retreated from the public eye. In 1999, she released CD titled A Time to Sing containing material from the unreleased third album.