![]() This changed the traditionally churchy feel of gospel to something more like pop music. Like the Edwin Hawkins Singers, the Love Center Choir set sacred and inspirational lyrics to arrangements that fused soft rock, jazz, soul and gospel. It sat on the Billboard Top Gospel Albums chart for three consecutive years. The album introduced Changed and Goin’ Up Yonder to the sacred music lexicon and became one of the biggest selling gospel albums of the 1970s. The Love Center Choir, which featured Walter’s sister Lynette and wife, Tramaine Davis Hawkins, recorded Love Alive (Light, 1975). In 1973, he and Edwin established the Love Center Church in Oakland. Walter traveled with the Edwin Hawkins Singers until the early 1970s, when he earned a master of divinity degree from the University of California at Berkeley and entered the ministry. The album was reissued on Buddah Records’ Pavilion imprint and the choir, renamed the Edwin Hawkins Singers, became an accidental crossover attraction. Soon other stations added the song to their playlists and Oh Happy Day became a national hit. Oh Happy Day garnered widespread interest when a San Francisco disc jockey began playing it on the radio. The opening song was a softly rocking remake of the hymnbook staple Oh Happy Day, with lead vocals by Dorothy Morrison. To raise the funds needed to get there, the choir recorded and sold a privately pressed album, Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord. This denominationally based community choir, which Edwin co-founded in 1967, aspired to attend the COGIC Annual Youth Congress in 1968. Walter also sang in the Northern California State Youth Choir of the Church of God in Christ. He sang in the youth choir that his older brother, Edwin Hawkins, directed at the Ephesian Church of God in Christ in Berkeley. Walter Lee Hawkins was born on May 18, 1949, in Oakland, California, to Mamie and Dan Lee Hawkins. Hawkins, who is often regarded as “the Father of Contemporary Gospel,” makes his San Francisco Symphony debut at these performances.Along with his brother Edwin and fellow Californian Andrae Crouch, Walter Hawkins was one of the chief architects of contemporary gospel music. Later that year, he was a guest on the PBS television special An Evening with the Boston Pops, which also featured Patti LaBelle and Desiree Coleman Jackson. In 1996 he teamed up with all-Swedish Gospel choir Svart På Vitt, on a ten-city US tour. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. Hawkins was selected by US Congress as an honored guest at the 8th annual Evolution of Gospel Conference at the John F. "Oh Happy Day" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry in 2005. His album Love is the Only Way includes a new version of his classic hit “Oh Happy Day” and features guest appearances by Dita Jackson, Brenda Roy, Lawrence Matthew, Bishop Walter Hawkins, and Lynette Hawkins-Stephens. Other records include Kings and Kingdoms and Joyful Christmas, for Sony Music, and All Things are Possible. In 1972, he won his second Grammy award for Every Man Wants to Be Free, the third for Wonderful in 1980, and his fourth for If You Love Me in 1983. He has since recorded dozens of albums and has been nominated for ten Grammy awards over a career that has spanned four decades. The album featured the song “Oh Happy Day,” which became one of the biggest Gospel hits of all time selling seven million copies and earning him a Grammy award in 1970. A year later he recorded the album Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord. Hawkins started the Northern California State Youth Choir. In 1967, with the help of Betty Watson, Mr. ![]() With his brother Bishop Walter Hawkins, Edwin Hawkins is the co-founder of the Edwin Hawkins & Walter Hawkins Music and Arts Love Fellowship Conference. He went on to sing at several churches and on a weekly Sunday night radio broadcast before he was sixteen years old. At age seven he began playing for the Hawkins family group, who released their first recording in 1957. He began singing in youth choirs at a very early age, eventually discovering the piano at age five. Grammy award-winner Edwin Hawkins grew up in a musical family.
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