By Peter Finney Jr. | Clarion Herald

There was rarely an occasion, either inside or outside of church, when Bishop Ferd Cheri couldn’t find a song to sing.

And, more often than not, the tune he would start belting out was one of the thousands of hymns he had collected in amassing the world’s foremost private depository of Gospel music, cataloged over a lifetime and resurrected after the collection was swallowed up by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.