![]() Hawkins gave very little thought to a career in music until 1968. They continued this success with Love Alive IV, released in 1989, which remained in the top position on the gospel charts for 39 weeks. This was surpassed by their third album, Love Alive III, which topped the million sales mark. Their second album, Love Alive II, sold nearly 300,000 copies. The group's debut album, Going Up Yonder, released in 1975, spent several months on the Top 40 gospel chart compiled by Billboard. The leader of the Love Center Choir, Hawkins led the group to two Dove Awards, presented by the Gospel Music Association, and multiple Grammy nominations. His songs continue to be sung internationally by church choirs, professional choirs, gospel groups and soloists, and are especially beloved by a generation of singers and musicians for whom Walter and Edwin Hawkins were as important an influence as James Cleveland and Roberta Martin were to the generation before them.The younger brother of gospel vocalist and choir director Edwin Hawkins, Bishop Walter Hawkins was one of gospel's most successful performers. In his lifetime, he earned a Grammy Award and eight Grammy nominations, three Dove Awards and a host of other accolades. Walter Hawkins died of pancreatic cancer at his home in Ripon, California, on July 11, 2010. The annual workshop trains and educates artists on a variety of aspects of gospel music and the gospel music industry. To give back to the music industry that nurtured them, Walter and Edwin organized the Music & Arts Love Fellowship. The Hawkins Family’s crossover sound drew sacred and secular music fans to their concerts. Their several albums for Light, which introduced songs such as What Is This, He’ll Bring You Out and Jesus Christ Is the Way further cemented the Hawkins name in gospel music history. Walter also founded the Hawkins Family, a singing ensemble that author and publicist Bill Carpenter called “gospel’s most successful family act.” It featured Tramaine, Lynette, Edwin and cousins Shirley Miller and Lawrence Matthews. The overwhelming success of Love Alive led Hawkins to record a series of Love Alive albums for Light Records: Love Alive II (1978), the million-selling Love Alive III (1990, featuring vocalists Daryl Coley and Bishop Yvette Flunder), Love Alive IV (1993) and Love Alive V (1998), the latter celebrating the Love Center Church’s silver anniversary. ![]() 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. Along with his brother Edwin and fellow Californian Andrae Crouch, Walter Hawkins was one of the chief architects of contemporary gospel music.
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