A Bermudian gospel singer whose brush with death only deepened his religious faith had a dual career in the island’s hotel industry as a manager and an entertainer.

Jay Fox, who started out singing in church, was given a guitar at 16 by his mother and, inspired by the 1960s music of Ricky Nelson, Paul Anka and the Beatles, began performing.

His cousin, Sheena Notter, said that Mr Fox was born on Texas Road in St David’s into a large and musically inclined family.

He took the name Jay over his given first name of David because “we had so many Davids in the family”.

Ms Notter added: “My father, Harry Nelson Fox, who was known as Black Wolf, taught him the guitar.

“We were all songbirds. We used to have performances in the living room, but Jay just ran with it.”

Mr Fox favoured the crooner style of the likes of Engelbert Humperdinck and Tom Jones, she said.

On stage with the Variations — a band with many of his relatives — Mr Fox played at hotels and clubs around the island.

Ms Notter said: “He was like a jaybird, because he could sing. We didn’t see much of him. When you were in a band in Bermuda back in those days, your days and nights didn’t belong to you.”

Mr Fox settled down to a career in hotel management but rediscovered music one night as manager at Pompano Beach when he picked up a guitar to entertain guests.

Mr Fox told the Mid-Ocean News in a 1993 interview: “My work in the hospitality industry has put food in the mouths of my family, while my music has fed itself.”

He began writing and performing songs even as his work took him through finance as well as food and beverage at a string of hotels: Holiday Inn, Sonesta Beach and the Southampton Princess.

He also worked as purchasing director for the Elbow Beach Hotel.

Some of the venues where he performed were the same establishments he had worked in the back offices, and now found himself singing up front.

His first album in 1981, Signature, mixed originals with Bermuda favourites, followed by Reflections three years later and a series of albums.

His recording moved into gospel, which he called “musical ministry”.

Mr Fox and his first wife, Catherine, moved in 1996 to Crossville, Tennessee.

He continued performing, which his cousin said included the renowned Grand Ole Opry show from Nashville’s Opry House.

In 2009, a devastating illness profoundly altered his life.

A carpenter, Mr Fox was collecting wood outdoors when he disturbed a wasp’s nest and got stung on the right leg.

It infected him with a rare necrotising bacteria.

Rushed to hospital with septic shock, Mr Fox sank into a coma.

He told The Royal Gazette in 2010 that doctors had given him a 10 per cent chance of survival.

After six weeks in a coma, Mr Fox woke up with one leg.

He recalled: “All my life, I have helped people in churches, hospitals and the disabled. I thought I never would be in the opposite position.”

He credited his recovery to his faith and the community’s prayers.

“God never tells you his plan,” he said. “It just happens.”

Mr Fox used a motorised wheelchair and visited the people who had prayed for him after he regained the ability to drive.

In 2013, he published a memoir, Triumph over Tragedy, in which he wrote of his beginning as “a mixed-blood child of a single mother of limited means in a prejudicial and insular society”.

He said he had been “an international ambassador of song for Bermuda” before taking up evangelical song at churches in Tennessee.

Mr Fox served for many years as musical director at the Mayland Church of the Nazarene in Crossville.

• David “Jay” Fox, a Bermudian gospel singer, was born on October 26, 1949. He died on July 4, 2023, aged 73.