During the first seven years of marriage, the Perrys couldn't afford a piano, and sports took most of Perry's free time. If she wasn't playing ball games, she was watching them, at BYU and later the Jazz. She played the piano at church, but that was all until her bishop asked her to write the road show while her ankle was mending.

Her show was such a hit that the neighborhood kids urged her to write pop music. She wrote 12 songs and made a demo tape, which she mailed to record companies in Nashville and Los Angeles, but that was a dead end.

"Writing pop songs was not satisfying for me," she says. "There's such a thin line between writing what kids will like and what your standards are. I thought, why not write things that I believe?"

She had six hours a day to herself to write songs, while the kids were at school. Within a year, she had 10 contemporary gospel songs. "Every song I wrote made me want to write another, and I forgot about sports," she says. Her brother Jack offered to pay the cost of publishing the first piece she wrote, and she sold the sheet music to Utah bookstores, making enough to repay Jack.

"I had never considered that you could make a living doing this," she says.

Contemporary LDS music was almost unheard of at the time. When the stores asked for more, she began to peddle other songs, going from store to store. Someone suggested she make an album. Merrill Jensen, a well-known professional LDS musician, agreed to take on the project, but it would cost $10,000.

Money was tight in the Perry household. They had already wondered how they would pay for their children's church missions and college.

Who knew that the music floating around in Perry's head was the answer. To raise the $10,000, Perry reluctantly borrowed money from several family members. The loans were repaid within six months.

"When she started writing the children's music, I thought, we've got something here," says Jerry Jackman, a Utah music publisher who heard Perry's early music.

"Where Is Heaven?" was released in 1979. "I'd be embarrassed to admit how many times I played the album that first day, hearing the sheet music come to life," she says. Her second album hit the market two years later. She also wrote and recorded a musical — "It's a Miracle" — and from 1981 to '84 the family toured the country with the show on weekends, along with 28 cast and crew members. They rode in a bus nicknamed "Faith" while their equipment traveled in a truck called "Works." They did 239 performances. Doug built the sets, Janice oversaw concessions, and their children had roles in the production.

At first the Perrys hoped the music would make enough to pay for its production. Then they hoped it would be enough to pay for missions. Finally, Doug, a data processor, quit his own job and formed Prime Recordings to produce and sell his wife's music.