She has known the heights of success in the New York recording community. She’s sung on commercial jingles for some of the world’s biggest advertisers, including Coca Cola, Pepsi, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Minute Maid and Wrigley’s Double Mint Gum. Yet the desire of Damaris Carbaugh’s heart is to be a servant of Christ. “I don’t want a ‘career,’” she says, “I want to be faithful.”

Damaris’s many recordings, on the Discovery House Music label, reflect her broad musical experience and her personal spiritual journey.

She was born November 4, 1955, in New York City, and was named for a woman who was one of Paul’s few converts on his visit to Athens (Acts 17:34). Her mother was an evangelist and her father a singer, and when they weren’t on the road or out of the country, they attended the Thessalonica Church in the South Bronx, which Damaris’s grandfather pastored.

When she was just three months old, her parents moved to Cuba to serve as missionaries in the days before Castro. A year later they moved to Puerto Rico and Damaris’s childhood years were spent between there and New York. At the age of eight, while living in Puerto Rico, Damaris gave her life to Christ. By the age of eleven she knew that all she ever wanted to do was sing.

As a teen, Damaris and her two sisters sang as a trio and traveled with their mother. At 15, she was asked to sing at a recording studio, and soon she was in demand by producers and advertising agencies in New York. In the years since, Damaris has sung with many well-known artists in recording sessions. She has performed vocals on countless advertising jingles and commercials, often in Spanish, which she speaks fluently.

In the early ’80s, Damaris was seeking a career as a secular performer, feeling that this was the way God would give her a platform and would use her talents. In 1982 she won the American Song Festival Talent Search and received a recording contract with CBS Records. The album was released in January 1984 but, in Damaris’s own words, “It went nowhere.”

A turning point came in Damaris life in 1988, when she visited a group of believers in Argentina who live in abject poverty. She was struck by their devotion to the Lord in spite of their circumstances, serving Him not for His blessings, but for the pure joy of loving Him. Damaris felt a need to give herself totally to the Lord, and began praying for ways to use her talents more fully for him.

Eventually, she was asked to sing on the “Day of Discovery” television program, produced by Radio Bible Class of Grand Rapids, Michigan. She serves as both a soloist and a member of the Discovery Singers on the Bible teaching program which airs weekly on network affiliates across the country. When viewer response convinced Radio Bible Class to form Discovery House Music to meet requests for recordings of the music featured on the program, Damaris was asked to be the label’s first solo artist.

For more, visit her website at http://damariscarbaugh.com/wp/