In this choir, they sing for their lives.

That man taking the solo once was a homeless heroin addict selling water bottles to commuters outside the Holland Tunnel for drug money. That woman in the front row was addicted before she became a mother at 17. The woman beside her was brought back by police officers from an overdose five months ago.

Hold on, they sing, hold on. Things are gonna get easier.

The Straight & Narrow Gospel Choir, which performs regularly at Catholic churches and schools around North Jersey, is the liveliest and most public face of Straight & Narrow Inc., the Catholic agency named for the intersection of two streets in Paterson where most of its drug-treatment programs are located.

Each member is recovering from some form of addiction. Each is somewhere on the path from addiction to sobriety.

That soloist, Irv DeBois, now has an apartment, a car and a good job. The young mother is getting ready to move from residential treatment to a halfway house and is studying for her high school equivalency exam. The woman whose overdose was reversed by Narcan, an opioid antidote, is progressing in treatment.

As America confronts its crisis of opioid addiction and overdose deaths, a multitude of medical, psychological, spiritual and legal tools are being deployed. The music of a gospel choir may seem an unlikely vehicle for recovery.

But ultimately, the struggle with addiction is individual and personal — engaged case by case, life by life. Among these singers, the soul-filling music has helped turn around once-hellish lives.

Their robes — brightened at the shoulders by yellow kente cloth — are identical. But each chorister has a unique story.

Some have been in recovery for 30 days, others for 30 years. Some have graduated from Bergen County’s finest high schools, and others are products of jails and the streets. They are young and old; black, white and brown; Catholic and non-Catholic.

They’ve hurt people and brought themselves shame and regret. Some have detoxed, rehabbed and relapsed — once, twice, eight times. They have lost mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers to overdoses, children to foster care, and years of their lives to addiction.

And yet they sing.

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To one another, to the Straight & Narrow clients who hear them during weekly chapel services, and to the public who listens, they are hope incarnate.

“I was dead,” said Emily, whom the Paterson police revived with Narcan after an overdose five months ago. When she woke up in the emergency room to find that her shoes had been removed — “that’s how dead they thought I was” — she decided she couldn’t go out on the street again. She went to detox, and treatment at Straight & Narrow.

“This place saved my life,” she said.

Darlene, there in the second row with the bobbing ponytail, counts 14 years in recovery. She’s a supporting singer, not a soloist. “I sing,” she said, “and it makes me feel so good.”

Singing is almost like medicine.

When a person sings, the brain boosts production of endorphins, chemicals that reduce pain and enhance pleasure, and dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a role in the body’s reinforcement and reward system. Blood levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, decrease.

“There is a physiological basis to why people feel good when they sing,” said Kathleen Murphy, coordinator of the music therapy program at Loyola University New Orleans and an expert on music therapy in addiction treatment.

Music may “mimic the impact of the drugs” used by patients with substance-abuse disorder, she said — “not to the same intensity, but it’s like the same mechanism.”

Singing in a group helps people overcome the feelings of isolation that are at the core of addiction.

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Gospel music, especially, expresses deep feelings. The members of the Straight & Narrow choir identify with its themes of suffering, surrender and a higher power leading toward a brighter future. When the audience and fellow singers respond and validate those feelings, it forges a connection.

Choir membership also requires a commitment. “When you’re in the choir, it’s not all about me, it’s all about the group,” Murphy said. “It's about those basic life skills, about being prepared, about being on time. Those things didn't necessarily happen in their active addiction.”

Ooh-oo child, Things are gonna be easier

Ooh-oo child, Things’ll get brighter … Someday, yeah, we’ll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun. Someday when the world is much brighter.

This was Irv DeBois’ daily life in the months leading up to Labor Day 2006: He slept under a bridge in Jersey City. He walked to BJ’s to buy water bottles. He sold water to commuters at the Holland Tunnel. He walked to a nearby housing project to buy heroin.

Four touchstones, all within a square mile.

Then one morning he woke up and saw himself.

“I had a moment of clarity,” he said recently. “I came outside myself. … I was like, wow, look what you’ve become.”

That day his brother, who drove by weekly to make sure Irv was still alive, swung by. Irv told him he was ready to make a change. He borrowed his brother’s cellphone — “of course, I’d sold my own” — and made the calls to get admitted to Straight & Narrow, he said.

Irv showed up for detox the day after Labor Day. Ten days later, he entered residential treatment. He stayed a year.

This was his second time in treatment. This time he was determined to make it different. His relapse — after four years sober — was a necessary step, he says now.

“I really had to go through that to get where I am today,” said Irv, who is 57. It gave “me a proper understanding of what recovery is like, and what addiction is.”

Now, with his Yankees cap at a rakish angle, he sits in his office behind a large plate-glass window looking out on the lobby of Straight & Narrow’s apartment building for men with HIV/AIDs. His cellphone rings and messages ding constantly.

He’s the assistant housing director for the agency, as well as a three-nights-a-week overnight supervisor at the residential treatment building. His job comes with its own apartment and parking space, which Irv fills with his own car. He’s come a long way in 12 years.

He’s also the unofficial link between Straight & Narrow’s treatment programs and the choir. It was Irv who recruited alumni to join the group and provide some continuity to its revolving membership. These graduates of the program measure sobriety in years, not months. They are role models — and they know the words to all the songs.

Irv is always watching, when the choir is on the road. There are rules for choir members — no fraternizing with the opposite sex, no wandering off. He makes sure they’re followed.

When the Mass nears its end, Irv steps to the pulpit to tell the congregation about the Straight & Narrow programs that serve 1,000 clients a day. “My name is Irv,” he begins, “and I’m a staff member of Straight & Narrow. I’m also an alumni of Straight & Narrow.”

He describes the residential and outpatient drug treatment for men and women: the halfway house, methadone clinic, detox unit, intoxicated-driver program and family success center.

He used to speak at 12-step meetings, talking about how to stay clean on the outside, but he doesn’t have time anymore. He relates to the men in the program, and they relate to him. “I am helping them, but helping myself,” he said.

Watch his face when he sings “Ooh-oo child,” his voice quavering just so in the solo. Watch his fingers, “walking” toward the beautiful sun in the song's lyrics. He’s channeling a higher energy there, his eyes heavenward. He holds his right hand near his temple, pointing his finger, teaching you something.

“Sometimes, certain songs, I just — the tears just start flowing,” he said. “I get frustrated because I don’t want people seeing me cry. [But] you know, this is part of who you are."

He opens the jar of hard candy on his desk. “You keep what you have by giving it away.”

Perhaps Father Norman J. O’Connor understood the therapeutic benefits of singing when he founded Straight & Narrow’s gospel choir in the mid 1980s. Or perhaps he just loved the music.

O'Connor, who died in 2003, served as Straight & Narrow's executive director from 1980 to 2002 and was known nationally as the “Jazz Priest.”

He emceed the Newport Jazz Festival for years as a member of its founding board of directors, while serving as chaplain at Boston University. He wrote about jazz for DownBeat and Metronome magazines and contributed a regular column to The Boston Globe. When he was transferred to New York to head up the Paulist Fathers' media ministry, he hosted a syndicated radio show and a local television show called “Dial M for Music.”

Then, in 1979, he got the call to go to Straight & Narrow in Paterson. The new halfway house for men, on Straight Street, was dedicated in April 2016 by then-Gov. Chris Christie and carries O'Connor's name.

The current musical director, Jordan Piper, is part of the tradition that O’Connor applauded: He was majoring in jazz piano at William Paterson University 10 years ago when his friend, the choir’s previous keyboardist, asked him to fill in. He’s been coming ever since.

Most of his singers don’t read music. A few sang in church choirs. The roster can change from week to week. Members graduate or leave the program; new ones join.

“I've just learned the show must go on no matter what,” Piper said. “If I'm obsessed with how good a sound is or not, it’ll take away from their enjoyment.”

Murphy, the music therapist, said that’s right. “It's not about the product," she said. "It’s about the experience. It‘s about showing up. It’s about following through on a commitment.”

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Sure, Piper plays the same songs over and over — he never looks at a page of sheet music. But in his understated, quiet way, he loves the work.

Each week there are small victories: A young man steps forward from among the supporting singers to learn a solo, overcoming his shyness and nervousness. Another, new to treatment, sits in on bass, finding the groove after a few practices.

Elton West, the conductor, keeps time with a tambourine and feeds the choir the words. Now a manager at a Paterson chemical factory, he completed treatment decades ago. .

“They’re not all singers,” he said, “but together we make it work.”

There's an army rising up

To break every chain, break every chain, break every chain

To break every chain, break every chain, break every chain I hear the chains falling ...

There’s a beauty that shines through Darlene Walsh’s intense blue eyes, despite years of drinking and drug use. At 57, she counts 14 years in recovery — and 12 years prior to that before she relapsed.

She’s been addicted to alcohol, cocaine and Adderall, had three children, spent time in jail for stealing checks and using other people’s credit cards.

Standing in the second row during rehearsal, with a baseball cap on her head and a scarf draped around her neck, Darlene never stops moving with the beat. “I don’t have that great of a voice,” she said. “I’m more of a background singer.” But “the words and the music [express what] I really believe.”

Darlene came back to the choir last year, in part “to help the women clients, and show them recovery is possible,” she said. They chat on the bus rides to suburban churches and over the lunches prepared by the congregations they visit. Straight & Narrow's approach to treatment and recovery is threefold: physical, emotional and spiritual. Singing in the choir unlocks the spiritual, she said.

When the choir launches into “Break Those Chains” — as it did to kick off Paterson’s recovery walk in September — everybody claps in time. She loves that. “It’s exactly what the song says. It’s so upbeat,” she said.

“The chains are coming off. I can feel them," she said. "I don’t need them anymore.”

Darlene was a 13-year-old transplant to Fair Lawn from New York City when she started drinking. Her father had died in a car accident, and she was the middle of three children, born a year apart. She didn't get much supervision.

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Drinking led to dropping out, and eventually Darlene had a daily cocaine habit. She was a high-functioning drug user; she earned a GED, graduated from a medical-assistants program, had a son, married a man she met at Alcoholics Anonymous, and had two more children by the time she was 35.

She’s been in all kinds of rehabilitation programs, starting at age 24: Smithers Alcoholism Treatment center, the celebrity rehab center in Manhattan; a Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation center in Minnesota; St. Clare’s Hospital in Boonton; Holy Name Medical Center’s outpatient program, and Straight & Narrow.

These days, she reminds herself each morning that she has an illness, but it’s no longer a daily struggle to stay sober, she said. She prays. She attends Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings four or five times a week to “help me to remember who I am, and what can happen to me if I pick up again.”

Her newest goal: to stop smoking.

The bus left Paterson at 10 a.m. for the noon service at Our Lady of the Magnificat Roman Catholic Church in Kinnelon. It rolled down Railroad Avenue and across Broadway, where working people waited, even on a Sunday morning, for van and bus transport to work.

The Magnificat campus was verdant amid Kinnelon’s rolling hills. Pine beams soared over the church's circular sanctuary, and light shone through modern stained-glass windows in shades of blue and green.

The choir members arrived and took a smoke break, then filtered into the building.

When the choir sings at Sunday Mass at Roman Catholic churches around Passaic, Morris and Sussex counties, staid congregations perk up. Parishioners clap. They stand and sing.

Congregations see their donations at work — Straight & Narrow receives a portion of its $24.5 million annual budget through parish collections for Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Paterson.

But mostly, those in attendance witness the power of redemption.

“Everyone has a testimony, whether it’s related to drug addiction or not,” said Pat Solomon, the female soloist for whom “I’ve Got a Testimony” is a signature song. “Everyone.”

Cocaine was once the love of Pat’s life. She first came through the program when she was 18 — “not ready for recovery,” she said recently. The last time, she was 49. Now she’s been a drug counselor at Straight & Narrow for seven years and plans to go to nursing school.

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“I can see that I’ve been truly blessed,” she sings.

Later, a woman from the congregation approaches the choir members.

“I’ve been waiting for you to sing,” she said. “I’m 33 years in recovery.”

The singers and the congregant shared a smile of recognition.

Email: washburn@northjersey.com