Christy Nockels, a Dove Award-winning singer, songwriter, and worship leader, first gained attention through her involvement with Sons & Daughters and Watermark before transitioning to a solo path in the closing years of the 2000s. Her initial solo release, the 2009 album Life Light Up, marked the start of a steady ascent on both Christian and mainstream charts, a trajectory reinforced by later projects such as the 2015 recording Let It Be Jesus and the 2023 collection This Is the Hour.
Born Christy Lynette Hill in Ft. Worth, Texas, and raised in Oklahoma as the daughter of a pastor and a piano teacher, she encountered Nathan Nockels, her future husband and creative partner, during a 1993 Christian artists seminar. The couple wed two years later and composed material for their first project, Holy Roar, which they recorded alongside longtime associates Charlie and Kimber Hall under the Sons & Daughters name.
After returning to Texas, the pair attracted support from Rocketown Records, the independent imprint founded by Grammy Award-winning CCM artist Michael W. Smith, leading to a move to Nashville in 1998. There they established Watermark, whose five albums delivered notable chart performance and multiple Dove Awards. Nockels stepped out on her own in 2009 with Life Light Up, issued on Six Steps Records. The follow-up, Into the Glorious, reached number two on Billboard’s Christian Albums chart upon its 2012 arrival. Following the live set Let It Be Jesus in 2015, she recorded her third studio album, The Thrill of Hope, for the Nockels’ own Keepers Branch Records. In 2017 she issued Be Held: Lullabies for the Beloved, a collection drawn from songs originally created as bedtime melodies for her children. An instrumental edition appeared the next year, and a “Renewed” version of The Thrill of Hope followed in 2019. After a five-year absence from new studio work, she returned in 2023 with This Is the Hour, a fourteen-track album featuring the CCM singles “Valor,” “Home,” and “Come Magnify.”
