iSound

Even in New Orleans, a city known for its tolerance for the exotic and eccentric, Sister Gertrude was impossible to ignore.

For more than twenty years she roamed the French Quarter, dressed in a nurse's uniform -- her mission was to heal the sinners; the Word of God was her medicine. Planted at some street corner, she shouted or sang the Gospel through her megaphone and kept time with a tambourine -- or, more accurately, battered Time itself with rhythms that intensified as the spirit took her.

She sang the old praise songs but more often she extemporized sermons around themes that she would chant again and again -- "I Got the New World in My View," "I Am the Living Bread," "God's Word Will Never Pass Away" -- as her tambourine rattled and snapped. She admonished everyone within earshot to surrender, right then and there, to the Lord. Some did. And nobody, not even those in a more leisurely pursuit of salvation, forgot her.

It...