Dee Dee Warwick
September 25, 1945 – October 18, 2008
One of Dee Dee Warwick’s earliest gigs was in the Gospelaires, a singing trio with sister, Dionne Warwick and aunt Cissy Houston. After a 1959 performance at the legendary Apollo Theater, the Warwick sisters were asked to do some session singing, a practice they continued for several years. Dee Dee recorded her first solo record in 1963 with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller at the helm. She continued to make Top 40 R&B hit records throughout the ’60s and early ’70s, with her version of future-Supremes hit, “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” being arguably her best known. Dee Dee suffered from drug addiction through much of her later life, perhaps hampering her career during those years. She passed away at the age of 63.
Clyde “Red” Foley
June 17, 1910 – September 19, 1968
Red Foley was one of country music’s most popular performers during the ’40s and ’50s. He sold upwards of 25 million records during his career, and his “Peace In The Valley” was the first gospel record to be certified a million-seller. Known as Mr. Country Music, Foley became part of the Grand Ole Opry’s radio program in 1946, and a decade later, he successfully transitioned to television. After performing during two Grand Ole Opry shows in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Red Foley died of heart failure in his sleep later that night. He was 58 years old.
Johnny Cash
February 26, 1932 – September 12, 2003
Technically considered a country music artist, Johnny Cash actually transcended the genre to be one of the most important singer-songwriters of any music, period. With an authoritative deep voice, a cannon of songs that sounded like a freight train coming your way, and lyrics that made you feel as if he lived them, Cash exemplified all that is American music. To many, he and his wife and musical partner, June Carter Cash are considered country music’s first couple. During a career that spanned almost 5o years, Cash was equally at home performing rockabilly, folk, gospel, country, rock ‘n roll and blues. His stable of songs included some of the greatest of any genre, “Walk The Line,” “Hey Porter,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” and “A Boy Named Sue.” Cash regularly covered songs by some of the world’s greatest artists, such as Bruce Springsteen, Trent Reznor, Depeche Mode, Bob Dylan, U2 and Tom Petty. In many cases, his interpretations eclipsed the originals, and most of the original artists would agree to that. Cash’s final years were bittersweet. Although he was experiencing a true renaissance thanks to a series of haunting albums produced by Rick Rubin, he was living through both physical and emotional pain. In the late ’90s he was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease associated with diabetes and was hospitalized with a serious case of pneumonia that damaged his lungs. And in May of 2003, he lost his wife June due to unexpected complications of heart surgery. The 71 year old Johnny Cash passed away less than four months later.
Marie Knight was a respected gospel singer who is best remembered for her work with Sister Rosetta Tharpe during the ’40s. Touring and recording with Tharpe throughout the ’40s and ’50s, Knight scored gospel hits with “Up Above My Head” and “Didn’t It Rain.” In 2002, Knight released Let Us Get Together, her first album in over 25 years. Marie Knight died of pneumonia in a Harlem nursing home at the age of 84.
Jerry Wexler was best known as a music producer who was responsible for some of the greatest music from the 1950s through the 1980s. He also coined the phrase “rhythm and blues” while he was editor of Billboard magazine before he became a partner of Atlantic Records in 1953. While at Atlantic he either produced or signed some of the all time greats of popular music. That list includes Wilson Pickett, Led Zeppelin, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers. He retired from the music business in the late ’90s, and passed away of congestive heart failure in 2008.
Thanks to the Jeff Ballenberg at Beat Marketing for the lead.
Joe Hinton was a gospel singer who began making non-secular soul music in 1958. Over the next six years, he scored a handful of R&B hits which included, “You Know It Ain’t Right,” “I Want A Little Girl,” and a cover of Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away.” Joe Hinton died of skin cancer at the age of 38.
Bob Willis was a preacher and respected country singer and songwriter, so much so that he has been called “Mr. Country Gospel.” Willis began writing straight country songs when he was just twelve years old but switched to country gospel when he turned his focus to the ministry at age 26. Over his career, Willis published over 140 songs and had songs recorded by over 100 artists including Jimmie Davis. Bob Willis passed away at the age of 75.
Ira B. Tucker Sr. was the lead singer for the celebrated gospel vocal group, the Dixie Hummingbirds. Joining the group at the age of 13, Tucker fronted them for the next 70 years. They have been called a direct inspiration for the likes of Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Paul Simon, B.B. King, Jackie Wilson and Aretha Franklin. Tucker died of heart failure at the age of 83.
Southern Gospel singer Dottie Rambo died from injuries sustained when her tour bus ran off the road on her way to a Mother’s Day concert. Rambo, who was elected to both the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame published more than 2500 songs. Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton recorded some of her songs. Rambo was 74 when she died.
Known amongst fans of gospel music as the “Godfather Of Gospel,” the Rev. Timothy Wright pleased crowds and with his uplifting songs, usually backed by a powerful choir. He died of undisclosed causes on April 23, 2009 at the age of 61. Wright released several albums over his career, two of which were nominated for Grammys, and one reached the Top 20 on Billboard’s Gospel chart. In July of 2008, Wright’s car was struck by a wrong-way driver, sending him to the hospital with life threatening injuries and killing his wife and teenage grandson.
Pop Winans was the patriarch of the Winans, a popular Gospel singing family that achieved various levels of success both collectively and individually. He and his wife, Delores recorded and performed together (Mom and Pop Winans) and separately throughout their careers. Son and daughter, Bebe and CeCe Winans scored the biggest hits of the family with their “Addictive Love,” and “I’ll Take You There.” Grammy-nominated Pops Winans passed away on April 8, 2009 in a Nashville hopice facility where he had been since January. He suffered a heart attack and stroke in October of 2008.
Mahalia Jackson
October 26, 1911 – January 27, 1972
Mahalia Jackson was a powerful gospel singer who many consider to be the most influential of the genre. After a childhood that consisted of living in a three-room home with twelve other family members, Jackson moved to Chicago at the age of sixteen. Two years later, she met Thomas A. Dorsey, the so-called Father of Gospel Music, who helped launch her career. Over the course of her career, Jackson record upwards of thirty five albums, and a string of million-selling singles, including “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” her signature song written by Dorsey. Mahalia Jackson died of diabetes and heart failure at the age of 60.
The acknowleged father of gospel music, Thomas A. Dorsey remains arguably the most influential figure ever to impact the genre. A versatile composer whose material shifted easily from energetic hard gospel to gossamer hymns, he penned many of the best-known songs in the gospel canon, among them “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” and “Peace in the Valley”; the founder of the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, he was also a pioneering force in the renowned Chicago gospel community, where he helped launch the careers of legends including Mahalia Jackson and Sallie Martin. Dorsey was born in Villa Rica, Georgia on July 1, 1899 and raised in the Atlanta area; there, in addition to the traditional Dr. Watts hymns, he also absorbed early blues and jazz. A child prodigy, he taught himself a wide range of instruments, and was playing blues and ragtime while still in his teens; under the stage name Georgia Tom, he was a prolific composer, authoring witty, slightly racy blues songs like the underground hit “It’s Tight Like That.” Dorsey settled in Chicago in 1918, where he briefly enrolled at the city’s College of Composition and Arranging; within months of his arrival, he began playing with area jazz bands including Les Hite’s Whispering Serenaders. Dorsey also formed his own group, the Wildcats Jazz Band, which traveled in support of Ma Rainey. He later collaborated in a duo with Tampa Red, but in 1928, after suffering his second nervous breakdown in as many years, he opted to retire from the music business. A two-year recovery period followed, during which time a minister convinced Dorsey to return to music, albeit to move from the blues to the church. His first attempt at writing a gospel song, 1921’s “If I Don’t Get There,” had met with some success, and he now returned with a renewed sense of purpose, renouncing secular music to devote all of his talents to the church circuit. Initially, Dorsey met with little success — forced to reject blues jobs and with no gospel offers forthcoming, he soon resorted to peddling song sheets to make a living. Dorsey’s luck appeared to be on the upswing by 1932, the year he organized one of the first gospel choirs at Chicago’s Pilgrim Baptist Church; his pianist, Roberta Martin, would in a few years emerge among the top talents on the church circuit. That same year, he also founded the first publishing house devoted exclusively to selling music by black gospel composers. However, a few months later — while traveling with Theodore R. Frye to organize a choir in St. Louis — tragedy struck when Dorsey discovered that his wife had died while giving birth to their son, who himself died two days later. Devastated, Dorsey locked himself inside his music room for three straight days, emerging with a completed draft of “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” a song whose popularity in the gospel community is rivaled perhaps only by “Amazing Grace.” Setting his loss behind him, he enjoyed his most prolific period in the years that followed, authoring dozens of songs with a distinctively optimistic sensibility for audiences held in the grip of the Depression. During that same fateful year of 1932, Dorsey also hired a singer named Sallie Martin to join his group at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. Despite her unrefined vocal style, she instantly connected with audiences; over time Dorsey became increasingly aware of her value not only as a performer but also as an entrepreneur, as she took over his music store and within a few months was turning a tidy profit. In 1933, Dorsey and Martin — along with Frye, Magnolia Lewis Butts and Beatrice Brown — organized the annual National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, where they introduced new songs to choir directors from across the nation. By now, Dorsey’s songs were enormously popular, not only among black churchgoers but also among white Southerners; by 1939, even the leading white gospel publishers were anthologizing his music. That year, he composed “Peace in the Valley”; although written for Mahalia Jackson, his demo singer at the time, its greatest success was in the white market — both Elvis Presley and Red Foley, among others, scored major hits with the song. After breaking through with the Singers Covention, Dorsey and Martin next hit the so-called “gospel highway,” a touring circuit previously restricted to a cappella quartets. Between the early 1930s and mid-1940s, he toured the nation under the banner “Evenings with Dorsey,” training young singers to perform his material; between 1939 and 1944, he also toured regularly with Jackson. By the 1950s, with the rise of hard gospel, Dorsey’s influence began to slip a bit, although the popularity of his greatest material held on; during the middle of the decade, with the rise of R&B, his melodies began to resurface in many of the era’s secular hits. As James Cleveland emerged as the undisputed king of contemporary gospel, Dorsey began to curtail his writing and traveling, essentially retiring from active duty during the 1960s; however, he continued spearheading the annual NCGGG event for years to follow, and remained among the most revered figures in spiritual music until his death on January 23, 1993. – Jason Ankeny (allmusic)
Pianist and singer Billy Stewart was a distinctive and influential R&B vocalist whose stuttering delivery and word-repetition technique borrowed liberally from the jazz practice of scat singing. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1937, Stewart started singing publicly with his mother’s group, the Stewart Gospel Singers, as a teenager. He moved into secular music by filling in occasionally for the Rainbows, a D.C.-area vocal group led by future soul star Don Covay; like fellow Rainbows substitute Marvin Gaye, Stewart never recorded with them. Despite winning a local talent contest with a unique rendition of Gershwin’s “Summertime,” Stewart was first discovered as a pianist, not a singer — while passing through on a tour, Bo Diddley heard him playing backstage and offered him a job as a backing musician. Thanks to his connection with Diddley, Stewart cut his first solo single, “Billy’s Blues,” for Chess in 1956. He moved to Okeh in 1957 and recorded “Billy’s Heartache” backed by the Marquees, another D.C.-area group featuring Gaye. Stewart would not return to his solo career until 1962, when he returned to Chess and cut a song called “Fat Boy,” a nickname he’d acquired for straightforward reasons. He scored his first charting single on the R&B side with “Reap What You Sow,” recorded at the same session, and began to hit his creative stride with the warm “Strange Feeling” in 1963. The following year’s “Count Me Out” was only a regional hit, but Stewart broke through in 1965 with two lovely R&B ballad hits, “I Do Love You” (which became the title track of his first album) and “Sitting in the Park.” Stewart toured heavily behind those two successes, and also charted the following year with “How Nice It Is” and “Because I Love You.” Later in 1966, he returned to the Chess studio to cut an album of jazz and pop standards, Unbelievable. Stewart’s unique vocal stylings were in full flower, earning him the new nickname “Motormouth,” and his revisitation of “Summertime” landed in the Top Ten on both the pop and R&B charts; it still ranks among the more radical reinterpretations of the oft-recorded warhorse. A waxing of Doris Day’s “Secret Love” just missed the R&B Top Ten. However, the hits subsequently dried up, and Stewart’s weight problem had worsened into diabetes. In 1969, he suffered minor injuries in a motorcycle accident, but the real tragedy struck on January 17, 1970, when the car Stewart was driving went off the road and plunged into the Neuse River in North Carolina, killing Stewart and the three bandmembers riding with him. He was not quite 33. – Steve Huey (allmusic)
The Rev. Claude Jeter, longtime member of gospel group The Swan Silvertones, passed away Tuesday (Jan. 6) at age 94. With a voice that bent and snapped like a lithe twig between his soulful tenor and screaming falsetto, Jeter led a life that was likewise all-encompassing. At turns a coal miner in rural west Virginia and the king of Chicago’s gospel scene, Jeter spent his twilight years as a pastor in Harlem, N.Y. In 1938, Jeter lived in Coalwood, W.Va. and worked as a coal miner. He started the gospel quartet Four Harmony Kings to divert himself from the dark shafts and coal dust of their jobs, and the group began singing at weekend gatherings. In 1942, The Four Harmony Kings moved to Knoxville, Tenn. to appear on WBIR’s Sunday Gospel Channel. With a new home came a new name: the Swan Silvertones. In 1946, they signed to King Records, then to VeeJay Records in 1955. As ’50s rock exploded American music, the Swan Silvertones faced a tough choice; stay with their traditional sound (spirituals draped over four-part harmonies) or morph into the upbeat rhythms of ’50s Doo-Wop. They chose to change. But despite their rhythmic shift, their lyrics were still pure, unalloyed Gospel. The 1959 release “Mary, Don’t You Weep,” a spiritual reworked into a call-and-response ballad, was the band’s biggest hit. Jeter’s line; “I’ll be a bridge over deep water, if you trust my name” inspired Paul Simon to write his ’60s classic “Bridge over Troubled Water.” Jeter was ordained a minister at Detroit’s Church of Holiness Science in 1963. He felt increasingly torn between his devotional duties and pressure to enter a blues rock career. In 1967 he left the Swan Silvertones and moved to the Harlem section of New York City to work as a minister. In a 1992 New York Times interview Jeter said, “I promised my mother I would never sing nothing but for the lord. The devil, he’s over there singing the blues, and I’m over here singing gospel. Even though he’s got true words, I’ve got true words too.” He passed his final years living the words he’d sung. – Rachel Dovey (Paste)
The music that fills a Northeast Portland church Wednesday will honor Willa Mae Dorsey, 75, whose gospel-singing career lasted 56 years, filled five albums and won her a Grammy nomination. Dorsey died Jan. 5 in a Portland care center after a series of strokes. Her funeral is at 11 a.m. Wednesday at The International Fellowship Family, 4401 N.E. 122nd Ave. Dorsey, who lived in Portland for almost 40 years, was born July 2, 1933, in Atlanta. She began singing professionally when she was 19, tackling gospel songs written by her father’s cousin, Thomas A. Dorsey. He wrote, “Precious Lord,” one of her lifelong favorite songs. In an interview in 2002 in The Oregonian, she recalled singing at Lincoln Center, performing with Mahalia Jackson and sharing the stage with the Rev. Billy Graham. Dorsey sang in almost 40 countries for presidents, princes and ordinary people of faith. “Gospel music is for everybody,” she said in 2002. “The Creator is like the manufacturer who makes automobiles. If something is wrong with a car, you take it back to the manufacturer. … That’s where humanity has let itself down, by not going back to the manufacturer who made us.” Dorsey was a trailblazer when it came to integrating churches in the 1960s, according to Bil Carpenter, who profiled her in his book on gospel music, “Uncloudy Days.” “I broke the barrier for black singers in the white churches,” she told Carpenter. “I sang at a lot of white churches where they would come up to my face and tell me, ‘You are the first black to stand at our pulpit.’” Dorsey performed weekly on WERD, a black-owned and -operated radio station in Atlanta in the 1950s, and recorded with the Mighty Faith Increasers Choir in 1962. Her first solo album, “The World’s Most Exciting Gospel Singer,” was nominated for a Grammy in 1969. She recorded her best known album, “Stand Tall,” in 1970. A Billboard review at the time called her “one of the most original singers to ever emerge in the gospel scene.” Her “classical tones” and “unbelievable range” made her music an “unforgettable experience.” She was a regular on Lawrence Welk’s television show, insisting that she would sing only gospel and patriotic songs. “I don’t want to lose my anointing with God. So I have to stay on the straight and narrow,” she told George Cates, Welk’s musical director. “We’re trying to make a star out of you,” he replied, “and you’re trying to reach souls.” As late as 2006, Dorsey was still playing piano and singing at Lighthouse Mission Church in Northeast Portland. She’d linger after services to play the piano softly as people prayed in their seats. “It’s the least I can do,” she said. “People’s minds are so bothered in these days.” She figured they needed God, “just as I need him.” – Nancy Haught (Oregon Live)
One of Dee Dee Warwick’s earliest gigs was in the Gospelaires, a singing trio with sister, Dionne Warwick and aunt Cissy Houston. After a 1959 performance at the legendary Apollo Theater, the Warwick sisters were asked to do some session singing, a practice they continued for several years. Dee Dee recorded her first solo record in 1963 with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller at the helm. She continued to make Top 40 R&B hit records throughout the ’60s and early ’70s, with her version of future-Supremes hit, “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” being arguably her best known. Dee Dee suffered from drug addiction through much of her later life, perhaps hampering her career during those years. She passed away at the age of 63.
Marie Knight was a respected gospel singer who is best remembered for her work with Sister Rosetta Tharpe during the ’40s. Touring and recording with Tharpe throughout the ’40s and ’50s, Knight scored gospel hits with “Up Above My Head” and “Didn’t It Rain.” In 2002, Knight released Let Us Get Together, her first album in over 25 years. Marie Knight died of pneumonia in a Harlem nursing home at the age of 84.
Joe Hinton was a gospel singer who began making non-secular soul music in 1958. Over the next six years, he scored a handful of R&B hits which included, “You Know It Ain’t Right,” “I Want A Little Girl,” and a cover of Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away.” Joe Hinton died of skin cancer at the age of 38.
Bob Willis was a preacher and respected country singer and songwriter, so much so that he has been called “Mr. Country Gospel.” Willis began writing straight country songs when he was just twelve years old but switched to country gospel when he turned his focus to the ministry at age 26. Over his career, Willis published over 140 songs and had songs recorded by over 100 artists including Jimmie Davis. Bob Willis passed away at the age of 75.
Southern Gospel singer Dottie Rambo died from injuries sustained when her tour bus ran off the road on her way to a Mother’s Day concert. Rambo, who was elected to both the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame published more than 2500 songs. 
