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The First Family of Gospel Music

Forty years ago, Edwin Hawkins took gospel music high into the pop charts, launching a family dynasty that continues to lift souls in Oakland and far beyond.

Chris Duffy

     I’ve been through so many storms in my life,” Lynette Hawkins Stephens wails in robust contralto tones at August’s Art & Soul Oakland festival. The 40-voice Love Center Choir answers her with “He’s brought me through,” each syllable enunciated with the precision Bishop Walter Hawkins’ hand movements dictate.
     “The same thing He did for me,” she continues over the rhythm section’s loping waltz underpinning, the choir adding, “He’ll
do for you.”
     “I love to call His name,” she sings reverently as “Special Gift,” a 1988 gospel music hit penned by Walter, moves into a vamp after its third chorus.
     “Jesus,” Walter cries out in a high, ringing tenor, his pitch an octave higher than hers.
     “He’s my refuge,” she injects.
     “Jesus,” he responds, his voice growing progressively stronger as the brother-sister call-and-response continues.
     The tempo picks up for “He’ll Bring You Out” from Walter’s 1984 album Love Alive III. As choir member Karen DeVone takes the helm, Walter bounces in place, his arms waving vigorously while directing.
     Some of the hundreds of fans who’ve gathered for the afternoon-long gospel
concert get up to “shout” — a highly animated style of dancing marked by rapidly shuffling
feet and flapping arms that the faithful believe is inspired by the Holy Ghost — on a carpet that has been placed for that purpose on the asphalt between the stage and the seats.
     “We’ve turned downtown Oakland into a sanctuary,” Walter says at the conclusion of the song. His older brother Edwin, who programmed the performances on the outdoor festival’s gospel stage, looks on with pride from the sidelines. Earlier, the brothers had opened the concert together, backed by a 100-voice choir.
     Forty-one years ago, Walter was a pudgy teenager singing anonymously in Edwin’s Northern California State Youth Choir. The ensemble’s only album, Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord, was a vanity affair, hastily recorded at Ephesian Church of God in Christ in Berkeley — to help cover the expenses of a trip to a Church of God in Christ youth congress in Washington, D.C.  Early the next year, one of the album’s tracks — “Oh Happy Day,” Edwin’s ultra-hip arrangement of an old hymn, fueled by a Latin-tinged soul groove and featuring lead singer Dorothy Morrison repeatedly interjecting “good God” into the lyrics in a manner inspired by James Brown — began getting airplay on KSAN, the hippie era’s hugely popular San Francisco progressive rock FM station. The song soon crossed over to AM Top 40 radio, first locally, then nationally. By the end of 1969, “Oh Happy Day,” reissued by Buddah Records in New York and credited to “the Edwin Hawkins Singers,” was a Top 10 pop hit throughout the United States, England and other parts of the world. It would sell some seven million copies, permanently alter the direction of African-American gospel music, and vastly improve the fortunes of Edwin and his siblings Carol, Feddie, Daniel, Walter and Lynette, who had grown up in relative poverty in Campbell Village, a housing project deep in West Oakland.
     By the mid-1970s, Walter was a gospel star in his own right. He had become a minister in 1973 and, breaking with some of the conservative social strictures of the Church of God in Christ denomination while retaining its Pentecostal religious beliefs, launched his own church called Love Center, originally in a corner storefront on MacArthur Boulevard near Castlemont High School and now in a former auto dealership complex that takes up the eastern side of the block on International Boulevard between 104th and 105th streets. Two years later, with $1,800 borrowed from his then-mother-in-law, restaurateur Lois “The Pie Queen” Davis, he took his dynamic new Love Center Choir into Ephesian church and recorded an album titled Love Alive. Released in late 1975 by Light Records and distributed by Word, Inc., a powerful Christian record and songbook publishing house in Waco, Texas, it featured the rousing Walter Hawkins composition “Goin’ Up Yonder” led by his then-wife, the effusive mezzo-soprano Tramaine Hawkins. While it didn’t become a pop hit like “Oh Happy Day,” Love Alive nevertheless topped the gospel record charts for months on end and remained on Billboard’s gospel chart for more than three years, selling more than 300,000 copies.
     As one of gospel music’s leading men, Walter gradually slimmed down during the ’70s, and his once-processed hair became more natural and closely cropped. Yet at Art & Soul, he appears alarmingly reed-thin, though still quite handsome and typically fashionable in a white collarless long-sleeve shirt, white slacks and white tennis shoes.
     “Last year when I appeared on this stage, I was sick,” he testifies to the audience. “I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I found out I had pancreatic cancer, and I wasn’t supposed to be here today.”
    “God is a doctor who has never lost a case,” he adds before crooning one of his best-known songs, the lilting ballad “Marvelous,” his voice as clear and strong as it was when he recorded it 11 years back.
    “You gave that I might live,” he sings. “You gave that I might be set free. Exchanging Your life for mine, what a marvelous thing You’ve done.”
     Cancer of the pancreas is one of the deadliest forms of cancer, yet Walter appears to have beaten it. In fall 2008 he was so sick that he was unable to preach at Love Center for two months and could not join Edwin, Lynette and other members of their extended musical family for a week’s worth of gospel music workshops in Tokyo. In November 2008, he underwent 22 hours of radical surgery at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Modesto, followed by chemo and radiation therapy.
     “They removed a lot of stuff,” the 60-year-old preacher says as he sits in a small room at the front of the mansion in Ripon that he shares with Edwin and their older sisters Carol and Feddie, both now retired from performing. They’ve lived in the rural Central Valley town, located between Manteca and Modesto, for the past six years. Surrounded by corn fields and almond orchards, their home is little more than an hour’s drive from Love Center when traffic is light, although Walter stays in Oakland some nights in order to tend to his duties at the church, which now has more than 2,000 members.
     “They told me the surgery would probably take anywhere from five to eight hours,” he adds. “After they went in, they said that all of my vital organs were kind of glued together and my pancreas was, like, petrified. The surgeon just kept going for 22 hours.
     “I’m waiting for a report from my chemo doctor as to where I am, but the report from my surgeon is that they believe they got everything. Actually, I’m feeling good.”
     Walter, who resumed preaching at Love Center the first of 2009 and in June traveled to Toledo for his and Edwin’s 28th Annual Music
& Arts Love Fellowship Conference, attributes his faith in God with helping him endure the cancer crisis. “It’s 90 percent of it, although
I don’t want to take anything away from the surgery. I just went through it with an amazing sense of peace. I never had any sort of breakdown in coming to grips with what I was dealing with.”
     Edwin, Walter and their siblings come from a musical family, especially on their mother’s side. Mamie Vivian Hawkins, who was born in Houston, played piano, as did her father and two brothers, one of whom, Count Otis Mathews, led a jazz and blues band called the West Oakland Houserockers during the 1930s and ’40s. Their longshoreman dad, Daniel Lee Hawkins, originally from Shreveport, dabbled in Hawaiian steel guitar.
     “He listened to country and western every morning,” recalls Edwin, 66, “and we were trying to figure out why this black man was listening to country and western.”
     “My mother,” he says, “was very much into gospel.” She regularly took her children (two of whom are no longer living) to Good Samaritan Church of God in Christ, then located at Eighth and Peralta, although her husband attended only “once in a blue moon,” according to Feddie, 69.
     “He didn’t really become a Christian until his later years, but in my opinion, he was more of a Christian than some of those who wear the name,” says Lynette, 55, who is known to family and fans as “Baby Sis.”
      Daniel Lee did drive the kids around to various churches to sing, most often waiting outside until they finished. Mamie Hawkins was the Hawkins Family’s original pianist. Edwin took over for her when he was 7.
      “We used to ride around in the car,” Carol, 70, remembers. “My daddy used to roll down the windows and let us sing so people could hear us. It was fun.”
      “We would sing at somebody’s church almost every Sunday afternoon,” Edwin says. “We didn’t get paid as such, as you pay artists today. That would never happen. Sometimes they would give us what they called a love offering.”
      The Hawkins Family ran into other kid groups as they traveled from church to church, including the Stewart Four from Vallejo,
which included future superstar Sly Stone, and the Combs Family from Richmond featuring future “Oh Happy Day” lead Dorothy Morrison. Later, both in the Bay Area and Southern California, they got to know singer, pianist, and songwriter Andrae Crouch and his tambourine-playing twin sister Sandra. During the late ’60s, Andrae would play a role in modernizing African-American gospel music that paralleled and rivaled Edwin’s in influence and popularity.
      Daniel Lee was strict about seeing that the children did their homework and got to bed by 7, but he and his wife were otherwise more lenient than most Pentecostal parents, a factor that perhaps played into Walter’s eventual spilt from the Church of God in Christ and decision to start his own church independent of the large Memphis-based denomination.
     “Our parents were more flexible,” Feddie says. “We could go to the movies, and we did a lot of little activities that other kids didn’t. They were kind of strict on us in the church, even in the clothes that we wore. The girls couldn’t wear pants, but we did when we wasn’t around the church. We kinda rebelled a little bit.”
     Edwin began attending Ephesian Church of God in Christ on Alcatraz Avenue in South Berkeley when he was 14 or 15. He was impressed with the dynamic sermons of Bishop E.E. Cleveland and by choir director Ola Jean Andrews, whose jazz-imbued sense of harmony would influence Edwin’s thinking. She also forced him to play in keys other than F sharp, the key that had been favored by his uncle Otis.
      At 14, Edwin landed his first paying job as a church pianist, at Mount Pilgrim Church of God in Christ in a former movie theater on San Pablo Avenue near 27th Street. “I used to catch the bus and go there,” he recalls. Walter, who is six years Edwin’s junior, began getting paid as a pianist at 10. He started at East Oakland Church of God in Christ, then moved to Unity Baptist Church, where the pastor was a barber.
     “Part of my compensation was I got my hair cut for free on Saturday,” Walter remembers. “And I think probably got about $5.”
     Playing for other churches on Sundays prevented Walter from regularly attending Ephesian, which most of his family had
joined and at which Edwin had become the organist and eventually replaced Andrews as choir director, but it helped him hone his
musical skills.
     “The small churches didn’t have the caliber of singers that you would have at Ephesians [sic] and places like that, so I was developing techniques in how to get tone-deaf people to sing on key,” he explains.
     Walter was playing for two teenage groups — his own Praisers of God and the Heavenly Tones, which included his future wife Tramaine, Leon Russell’s future wife Mary and Sly Stone’s sister Vaetta — when Edwin first became keenly aware of Walter’s special musical talents, particularly as a songwriter.
     “He started writing early,” Edwin says. “The first song I wrote was ‘My Lord Is Coming Back.’ I think I was maybe 17. I didn’t write another song for a long time.”
     “I think my first was ‘Changed,’ which was on Love Alive I, ” his brother adds. “I wrote it when I was a teenager. It was years and years later that I recorded it. The Praisers of God were the first ones to sing it.”
     In 1975, “Changed” and “Goin’ Up Yonder,” both featuring Tramaine Hawkins, would become the first hit songs by Walter Hawkins and the Love Center Choir.
     “I think Walter’s probably one of the greatest writers ever, a far better writer than me,” says Edwin, who recently launched an “Oh Happy Day” 40th anniversary world tour that he projects will last two years. “I started just rearranging and started writing later. His writing and lyric content is so much stronger.”
     “We hear a lot of clichés in music today,” Edwin adds in reference to the simple,
soothing, often repetitive style known as Praise and Worship that’s so popular in current African-American gospel music. “It is important, but because it is so trendy, a lot of the writers have gotten lazy. You hear some of the same lyrics over and over again with different music, like “let‘s give glory to God” and “God is so awesome,” those kinds of things.
     “When Walter writes, he’s writing from a lot of experiences and the stuff that he’s gone through over the years. With the last occurrence of the sickness that he went through, we’re going to hear some different music that’s going to be able to minister to an even larger group
of people.”
     Although neither brother has a current recording contract, each remains a draw in the gospel music world. They often perform together — Edwin with Walter’s Love Center Choir, Walter with the Edwin Hawkins Singers — but conflicting bookings sometimes dictate they appear apart. Yet for the past four decades, they’ve worked together on nearly every recording project.
     “I tend to be more pop- and R&B–oriented in terms of my style,” Edwin says. “Earlier, there were a lot of influences that I borrowed from Brazilian jazz.”
     “We both work individually,” Walter, who describes his own style as ‘gutbucket,’ says of the writing and recording process. “At a certain point, I will run my stuff by Edwin. He’s extremely candid. It’s constructive criticism, but because I respect his opinion so much, I want it in a form that’s palatable for me.”
     “It’s an ongoing collaboration with the family,” he adds. “It was understood that if he worked with me, I was in charge, and if I worked for him in the Edwin Hawkins Singers, he was in charge. We flipped it back and forth, and it always worked.”
     Despite the lack of recent recordings, the brothers continue to spread their uplifting musical messages at concerts around the United States and at their Edwin and Walter Hawkins Music & Arts Love Fellowship Conference. The 28th annual edition of the week-long event was held in June 2009 in Toledo, Ohio, attracting some 2,000 participants who attended classes in vocal and instrumental music, songwriting, sacred dance, drama, the business of gospel music and the ministry of gospel music, as well as concerts by Rance Allen, Donald Lawrence, LaShun Pace and other gospel luminaries. The week ended with many of the attendees blending their voices in a mass choir to perform new compositions by the brothers and others. And in October 2009, Edwin launched a projected two-year Hope for the World Tour at St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco to mark the 40th anniversary of the ascendance of “Oh Happy Day” onto the pop charts, an unprecedented happenstance that made so very much music possible for the Hawkins family.

Sunny and Jamie Hawkins

     One of the most striking performances at the 2009 Art & Soul Oakland festival was that of Sunny Hawkins and the M.U.S.I.C. Department. The new 20-member ensemble’s original hip-hop-infused gospel music, all of it composed by Sunny and her keyboardist husband Jamie Hawkins, was as exciting as its retro 1950s fashions were stunning.
     Myiia “Sunny” Hawkins, a onetime Broadway actress and backup singer for artists such as Aretha Franklin and Patti LaBelle, wore a short black-and-white polka dot dress over a fuchsia tutu, along with black-and-white polka dot tennis shoes with multicolored laces, while singing lead in glowing mezzo tones or jumping about the stage as she conducted the singers with broad arm strokes. She designed the outfit herself, as she did those of the young women in the group, who wore black tutu skirts, white tops and white pearls.
     “I like to play with fashion,” the singer says. ”I’m also very aware that a lot of the trends tend to be risqué or provocative. You don’t have to necessarily look provocative as a woman to look cute. I find it a challenge to explore looks that are fun and express one’s self but that are also not going to offend the very people we’re trying to minister to.”
     The group’s name, Sunny says, is an acronym for “Maybe You Should Invite Christ.” Since moving to Oakland six years ago and marrying Walter and Tramaine Hawkins’ son, she had been the director of the youth choir at Love Center Ministries. She also teaches voice and gospel choir classes at Napa Valley College. Jamie, who once worked as bandleader for such secular stars as MC Hammer, Jodeci, Boyz II Men and Lauryn Hill, is the pianist and bandleader at the church and also works as a record producer for both his mother and father, among others. The couple had their first child, also named Jamie, in September 2008.
     Sunny and Jamie were childhood playmates in Oakland, but they lost touch with each other when she moved to Washington, D.C., at age 5. A mutual friend reintroduced them seven years ago, and Jamie asked her on a date.
     “She was cute — very cute,” Jamie recalls. “She’d grown up.”
     “We just clicked that day,” Sunny adds.
     Jamie produced his wife’s first CD, More of You, in 2004. After taking a break from performing to have little Jamie, Sunny organized the M.U.S.I.C. Department early this year. She and Jamie, who serves as keyboardist and bandleader, are presently working on an album by the group at the recording studio in their East Oakland home.
     The concept of the group, whose members range in age from 19 to 28, is, according to Sunny, “to stay free and stay focused and diligent about serving God and keep fresh and make sure that we don’t get into a mindset where salvation has to be boring.”

Joel Smith

     It used to be that playing gospel drums was a relatively simple task. All a drummer was really required to do was maintain a strong, steady beat — usually a boom-chuck-boom-chuck in 2/4 time — that would entice the vocalists to sing harder and drive the congregation into a frenzied shout.
     That was before the 1970s, when drummers such as Bill Maxwell with Andrae Crouch and the Disciples and Joel Smith with the Edwin Hawkins Singers and Walter Hawkins’ Love Center Choir began playing at technical levels on par with those of the best soul and pop studio musicians in New York and Los Angeles and adding touches of their own. Today, many of the most accomplished and creative drummers in the business — Teddy Campbell with the American Idol house band, Gerald Heyward with Mary J. Blige, Cora Coleman-Dunham with Prince and Kobie Watkins with Sonny Rollins, among them — started out in gospel music and drew on the innovations of players like Maxwell and Smith.
     Feddie Hawkins’ son Joel did his first gig with his uncle Edwin’s group in 1975, when he was 14, at a concert in Damascus, Syria. He’s been the Hawkins family’s drummer of choice ever since and has also recorded with a number of secular artists, including Sheila E. and
Al Jarreau.
      “I experiment on how I play with different artists, depending on their arrangements,” the 49-year-old Oakland musician says. “My thing is to try to color around their arrangements to broaden them more and still keep good time. The chops are one thing, but I’d rather make sure that the time is very consistent. It means nothing without that.”
     Smith is also the family’s bass player of choice. At live performances, he’s as likely to be playing bass as he is drums, and when he’s playing bass, his younger brother Jason Wright is often the drummer. In the studio, Smith frequently overdubs both bass and drum parts.
     He took up drums at age 6, bass at 12. “I liked ’em both so well that I wanted to continue both,” Smith says. “It so happened now that people will call me to do either one or they’ll have me do both on one session.”
     Smith has had offers to move to New York or L.A. to do studio work, but he turned them down out of fear that he’d “get caught up in the hype of things,” as he puts it. “I’m kind of a quiet type of person,” he explains. “I am so grounded in what I do; I don’t need a whole lotta hoopla.”
     In recent years, Smith has been gigging around Northern California — sometimes on bass, other times on drums — with English jazz pianist Terry Disley, formerly of Acoustic Alchemy, but he puts family before freelance work.
     “I love my family to the point where if they need me to do something, sure, I’ll do it,” he says.