SC Connecticut News

Yale University's Oral History in American Music (OHAM) project has expanded its collection with the addition of three Grammy Award-winning artists: Lady Tramaine Hawkins, Richard Smallwood, and BeBe Winans. The interviews were conducted by Ambre Dromogoole, assistant professor of Africana religions and music at Cornell University. This brings the total number of interviews with gospel greats in OHAM’s collection to 30.

Lady Tramaine Hawkins began her singing career at her grandfather’s church in San Francisco when she was just four years old. She later formed a gospel group called The Heavenly Tones and recorded an album. Hawkins won her first Grammy Award in 1981 for “The Lord’s Prayer,” performed with her husband, Walter. She has since been inducted into the Gospel Hall of Fame and has won two Grammy Awards, two Dove Awards, and 19 Stellar Awards.

Richard Smallwood started his career as a performer while studying at Howard University where he was a founding member of the first gospel choir on campus. His first album “The Richard Smallwood Singers” spent 87 weeks on Billboard’s gospel chart. He won his first Grammy and a Dove Award for his production on Quincy Jones’s “Handel’s Messiah: A Soulful Celebration.” He was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2006.

Benjamin “BeBe” Winans is an inspirational singer-songwriter of gospel, R&B, and Christian music from Detroit, Michigan. In 1988, he and his sister CeCe Winans became the first gospel artists to have a No. 1 album on the Billboard sales charts. He started his solo career in 1997 and has since recorded nine albums.

The OHAM gospel collection is part of a collaboration with Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music and the Department of Music under the Interdisciplinary Program in Music and the Black Church, launched by Braxton Shelley in 2021. The collection now includes more than 3,000 recorded interviews with prominent composers and musicians, dating from 1970 to the present day.