Walter died in 2010, also from pancreatic cancer. Edwin and Walter were involved in developing the Love Center Ministries mission in Oakland. In later years he would tour regularly with assorted family members as the Hawkins Family, and often performed with his brother Walter, a singer and composer. My father was not a committed Christian at that time but was what you’d call a good man … we heard from him some R&B music but also a lot of country and western when we were younger kids.” “My mother, who was a devout Christian, loved the Lord and displayed that in her lifestyle. “We grew up hearing all kinds of music in our home,” Edwin reflected. By the time he was seven, Edwin had replaced his mother as piano player, and on most Sunday afternoons the group would sing in a church somewhere. Daniel was a longshoreman who played the Hawaiian guitar, and Mamie was a pianist who accompanied Edwin and his numerous siblings in a family church singing group. Hawkins was born in Oakland, California, to Daniel and Mamie Hawkins. George Harrison cited it as an inspiration for his hit My Sweet Lord. Also that year the Four Seasons covered it on their album Half and Half, and it would be recorded by Glen Campbell, Johnny Mathis, Elvis Presley, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and Franklin and Mavis Staples, not to mention Robson and Jerome, and Susan Boyle. In 1970 it won a Grammy award for best soul gospel performance. So it proved.įans of Motown or soul singers such as Sam Cooke or Aretha Franklin could identify with the sound immediately, but instead of pop lyrics, Oh Happy Day was an unabashed celebration of religious faith. “Then the label got distribution with Buddah and they felt it would be a better move commercially if we became the Edwin Hawkins Singers,” Hawkins recalled. It was decided to release it as a single, on the newly created Pavilion label. Oh Happy Day was originally a hymn written in the mid-18th century The song being long out of copyright, Hawkins was able to claim a songwriting credit. In particular, radio stations in San Francisco had seized upon Oh Happy Day, arranged by Hawkins in a gospel-meets-R&B style, with the choir’s rousing ensemble singing in a call-and-response pattern with Dorothy Combs Morrison’s regal lead vocal. The choir sold 600 records in Cleveland, before returning to California and discovering that, as Hawkins put it, “the underground people had been showing an interest in our album”. The whole album was recorded on a simple two-track machine because we could afford no more.” We sold them all to the church’s regular patrons and had another 1,000 or so pressed to take with us to a youth convention in Cleveland, Ohio. “We originally only wanted about 500 records. “I formed the choir at the local church in Berkeley, the Ephesian Church of God and Christ,” Hawkins told Blues & Soul magazine in 1970. The choir had been formed by Hawkins and Betty Watson while Hawkins was a university student at Berkeley, taking a course in interior design. It had first appeared on an album, Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord (1968), recorded by the Northern California State Youth Choir.
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