Walter Hawkins

Bishop Walter Hawkins, sibling to the gospel singer and choir leader Edwin Hawkins, rose among the most commercially dominant figures in the genre. As director of the Love Center Choir he guided the ensemble to a pair of Dove Awards from the Gospel Music Association along with repeated Grammy nominations. Their first release, Going Up Yonder, appeared in 1975 and lingered for months inside Billboard’s Top 40 gospel ranking. The follow-up, Love Alive II, moved close to 300,000 units; Love Alive III then eclipsed that figure by exceeding one million copies sold. Success continued with Love Alive IV, issued in 1989, which held the top gospel-chart slot for 39 consecutive weeks.

Hawkins had shown scant interest in a professional music path until 1968. Seeking funds to transport the Ephesian Church of God in Christ youth choir—then under Edwin Hawkins’s direction—to a Washington, D.C., convention, he assisted in recording the album Let Us Go into the House of the Lord. Although conceived for local distribution only, the project achieved worldwide reach after the single “Oh Happy Day” surpassed a million copies. The performers subsequently appeared on tour billed as the Edwin Hawkins Singers.

By the early 1970s Walter Hawkins departed the ensemble to establish an independent career. After completing a Master of Divinity at the University of California, Berkeley, he established the Love Center Church in Oakland. Two years afterward he revisited the Ephesian Church of God in Christ to cut Going Up Yonder with the Love Center Choir. While maintaining that primary affiliation he occasionally joined forces with his brother and other relatives: he contributed to an album recorded with the Oakland Symphony, wrote and produced Baby Sis for his youngest sister Lynette in 1985, and supplied the track “Everybody Ought to Know” for his wife Tramaine Hawkins’s debut solo studio album The Search Is Over that same year. In 1988 he participated in the Hawkins Family album Special Gift; three years later he served as co-producer, musical director, and arranger on the Grammy-winning Tramaine Live, credited to his then-former spouse.

Additional collaborations extended beyond family circles. Alongside the Love Center Choir he appeared on recordings by Van Morrison and Lee Oskar. Independently he worked with Diahann Carroll, Sylvester, and Jeffrey Osborne. In 1985 he composed and produced three songs for the Williams Brothers’ Hand in Hand. During the 1990s he resumed leadership of the Love Center Choir on the Grammy-nominated Love Alive V: 25th Anniversary Reunion, released in 1998. In the following decade his catalog experienced renewed availability through multiple reissues and the fresh Stellar Award-winning project Song in My Heart, issued in 2005.

After undergoing surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2008, Hawkins recovered sufficiently to take part in a later Hawkins Family reunion tour. Plans were under way for a sixth Love Alive recording slated for fall 2010 when he died from the disease at his home in Ripon, CA, on July 11 of that year, aged 61.