Terrell Grice's Music Show Is Therapy, Too
BY
Ivan Guzman | Aug 01, 2024
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Terrell Grice couldn’t even listen to secular music until his late teens. Having grown up in South Carolina, the 30-year-old was raised by his grandparents and, like many Black kids born in the South, spent a lot of his time in church. “They kept me on a Gospel-only diet,” he tells PAPER.
Now, Grice hosts what has been called “one of the most comprehensive talent discovery platforms for R&B music.” Having amassed over 1.3 million subscribers on YouTube, The Terrell Show is a game show based that features singers, producers, and actors who must sing the first song that utilizes a specific word within 10 seconds. But the show is also much more than that. With Grice as the show’s warm and energetic steward, viewers get a glimpse into the candid humanness of big time celebrities’ (Kelly Clarkson, Keke Palmer, Cynthia Erivo and Kelly Rowland are notable past guests) personal lives and careers.
“I think transparency heals,” Grice says.
When asked about dream guests for the show, he hesitates before saying: “Every single season, I have a dream guest that I did not expect. And what I mean by that is my dream guest is one that is super open and willing to teach me and my audience things.” In this way, The Terrell Show has become a fun little therapy session for these artists to express themselves in — and it’s fitting, as Grice comes from a family of therapists himself.
The show has also been a form of therapy for Grice, quite literally born out of a series of traumatic life events. In an intro video for the show’s fifth season, Grice revealed that four months before shooting the very first episode of the show, his dad was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident. Around that time, he also decided to come out to his family. “It did not go well whatsoever,” he says. “It was a very disappointing day for me.”With this series of unfortunate events, Terrell’s faith in God was starting to falter, but in that video, he explains that there was one pillar of hope: music. “I decided that I wasn’t gonna let anybody see my pain,” he says in the video. “I want you to see love, light and joy.” Thus, The Terrell Show was created, and since then has become a staple for celebrities to appear on to promote their work, akin to late night talk shows.
If kids back in the ‘70s were yelled at for being glued to the TV screen watching The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, then the equivalent of that in the modern age would be tuning into personalities like Terrell. It makes me wonder what he was like as a kid growing up in Mullins, South Carolina.“I was tutoring calculus at 14,” he says. “I was such a crazy math nerd. I wanted to be a teacher.” Grice got really into tennis throughout high school, but he was injured in his junior year, which led him to getting involved in an entertainment program in his school instead. He took a class on TV, and that paired with his fascination with The Fighting Temptations (2003) opened up his mind to a world that could be more than just straight church gospel. “I was just trying to catch up, so to speak,” he says.
After high school, Grice graduated from the film program at Full Sail University in Florida and decided to drive to LA with $300 in his pocket. He slept in his car and took whatever wacky gigs he could get, until finally landing on some jobs in the casting department for shows like The Voice and Showtime at the Apollo. This is where he learned his interview skills, and it also showed Grice the side of Hollywood that can be gatekeep-y and neglectful of raw talent. It was another reason why he got the idea to start his own show, an incubator for talented voices regardless of follower count.“It’s less about music and singing and more about the human connection,” he says. “My audience is a heavily Black audience, and there’s almost already a secondhand communication that can just flow without explanation.” It’s true — there’s an honesty and therapeutic nature to the way Terrell interacts with his guests, and this innate charisma has led to other ventures like the show’s spin-off IKYFLand T and Coco, where Grice and singer Coco Jones hit the road and try new adventures.
For Terrell, YouTube has opened up a world of possibilities and made a small-town Southern boy into a mainstream face that translates talented individuals to the masses. It’s also been healing for him and his family, who were able to understand his sexuality by watching his videos. “My mother specifically said to me that watching my videos helped her get to know me better,” he says. “It kind of helped usher in a new relationship with my parents and healed it at the same time.”
Grice’s signature blue background will remain. He will continue to bring on talented vocalists and hype them up as they sing insane runs under pressure. For him, it will always be about the music.
Photos courtesy of Terrell Grice / YouTube
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