Richard Smallwood

Born on November 30, 1948, in Atlanta, Georgia, Richard Smallwood has built a long-standing reputation as a skilled and influential gospel pianist, singer, songwriter, and producer whose career stretches back to the 1970s. He earned degrees in vocal performance and piano from Howard University, where his fellow students included Donny Hathaway, Debbie Allen, and Phylicia Rashad. After graduation Smallwood joined the faculty of the University of Maryland as a music instructor and later assembled the Richard Smallwood Singers, whose self-titled debut album arrived in 1982 and logged 87 weeks on Billboard’s gospel chart. The ensemble maintained its momentum with a string of successful releases through the early 1990s before Smallwood disbanded the project to concentrate on his choir Vision, whose first recording, the Verity-issued Adoration: Live in Atlanta, appeared in 1996. In addition to those ventures, Smallwood’s compositions have been covered by Whitney Houston, Destiny’s Child, Kelly Price, Gerald Levert, and Aretha Franklin. His expansive two-disc Anthology Live surfaced in 2015.