[4] His father died when Barrett was 16, and he then moved to Queens, New York, where he lived with his uncle and took a job at Flushing Hospital extracting glands from cadavers.
[3][4] Barrett was charged in 1989 with orchestrating a pyramid scheme, by encouraging his congregants to donate to a series of economic development fundraisers which yielded over two million dollars in total.
[5] The financial viability of the plan was judged by a court to be infeasible, and Barrett was ordered to place his church's title in receivership as a result.
[4] In 2007 Barrett's youngest daughter Kleo, who worked as a Cook County sheriff's deputy, was murdered by a man whom she had previously dated 3 years earlier.
[6] In the 1970s, Barrett's congregation included many noteworthy Chicago-area musicians, such as Maurice White and Philip Bailey of Earth, Wind and Fire, Donny Hathaway, and Phil Cohran.
[4] The album featured instrumental contributions from Phil Upchurch, Gene Barge, Charles Pittman, and Richard Evans (of Rotary Connection).
[7] It was reissued by Light in the Attic Records in 2010 to critical acclaim[7][8][9] and praise from musicians such as Jim James and Colin Greenwood.
Also in 2016, Barrett's music was used in an Under Armour commercial directed by Harmony Korine, on the soundtrack to the film Barry,[4] and in the 2017 Almeida Theatre (London) production of Martin Crimp's The Treatment.
In 2019, Barrett's song "Nobody Knows," from his 1971 album Like a Ship (Without a Sail), was used in an AT&T commercial titled "Roll Up Your Sleeves" and in a trailer for the film Corpus Christi.
In 2023, "Nobody Knows" was used in the closing credits of episode 2 of the BBC culinary drama "Boiling Point", created by Philip Barantini, James Cummings and Stephen Graham.