CeCe Winans has topped charts — gospel, Christian, R&B — for over 30 years as part of a duo and as a solo artist, performing tuneful and contemporary arrangements of praise songs that were an easy on-ramp to fans of popular secular music.
Her latest album, “The Hymns,” harks back to other influences, with its stripped-down renderings of 16 selections used in churches of all races for more than a century. Recording songs like “Amazing Grace,” “I Need Thee” and “It Is Well,” often with sparse accompaniment and simple vocal phrasing, Winans said what came to mind were the mothers of the church of her youth.
“They weren’t performing,” she said in a video interview. “They were singing from their hearts.” Winans recalled her parents and the church congregation singing along “with that one little beat. The simplicity and the power in these songs never get old.”
In an era when Billboard’s Gospel chart has been dominated by albums with crossover appeal from artists like Kanye West and Maverick City Music, “The Hymns” debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Gospel Albums chart in June, Winans’s 12th LP to do so.
The new album is only one aspect of what Winans, 61, has been pondering as her legacy. “At this stage of my life,” she said, “it’s all about the next generation. I’m only here because somebody cared enough about me to teach me the importance of being strong. My life is dedicated to that now.”
Born Priscilla Marie Winans, the eighth of 10 children of David and Delores Winans, she remembers music as a constant. “My mom and dad were singers and they made sure there was a piano in the house,” Winans said.
The family worshiped at Detroit’s Zion Congregational Church of God in Christ, founded by her great-grandfather, Bishop Isaiah Winans, and attended Mumford High School, which produced gospel stars including Fred Hammond, Deitrick Haddon and some of the Clark Sisters.
Although four older brothers found fame as the contemporary gospel group The Winans, CeCe became a licensed cosmetologist, with her own beauty salon in Detroit. In the early 1980s she and her brother Benjamin, known as BeBe, moved to Nashville to join the PTL Singers, a featured group on the televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s “PTL Club.” One day, Tammy asked the two siblings to sing “Up Where We Belong” from the 1982 film “An Officer and a Gentleman,” but give it a religious makeover. Church communities loved the Christianized cover of the song (“Lord, Lift Us Up”), and the duo who sang it, BeBe and CeCe Winans, was born.
Their 1987 self-titled album introduced them to a much larger audience. Like their older brothers, they delivered sacred songs in a mélange of R&B and gospel. It appealed to a younger audience that was also grooving to Stevie Wonder, Anita Baker and Peabo Bryson. One song from the album “For Always,” earned them a Grammy Award. The two rose to gospel superstardom, placing albums on the Gospel, Christian and R&B charts and earning a platinum certification for 1991’s “Different Lifestyles.”
CeCe’s solo debut album “Alone in His Presence” (1995) set aside the R&B-flavored sacred songs that were her stock-in-trade in favor of delicately rendered praise and worship songs supported by lush orchestral arrangements. “I was able to share another part of me,” Winans explained. “I love the dancing, the celebratory songs, but it’s in the quiet moments, when your heart is heavy, you need to steal away and hear from the Lord.”
Winans has now made a similar sonic shift with “The Hymns,” moving away from the power ballads and up-tempo rhythms of her worship albums toward the simple melodic beauty of hymnbook classics. Her original idea, she said, was not to make an album but just to create some quick content for her social media accounts, where she has millions of followers across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. When she asked her team to help her shoot “some hymns with piano, just very stripped-down and simple,” they persuaded her to record them as an album instead.
With voice, organ and piano dominating most of the tracks, and guitar, gentle percussion, handclaps and a few background vocalists sprinkled in on others, “The Hymns” exudes a soulful stillness. “We wanted the album to be very intimate,” said the guitarist Tyrone Jackson, who, along with the keyboardist Thomas Hardin Jr., co-produced the album. “It was about the original vision: great melody and CeCe’s amazing voice.”
Hardin added that their challenge was to “support the message and the melody of the songs but make sure we were not in the way.” Where other artists may be tempted to fill each moment of silence with sound, Winans exercises restraint, limiting her vocal ornamentation alongside gentle accompaniment.
The album arrives at a time when some musicians worry that the volume and popularity of newly-composed gospel and contemporary worship songs threaten the future of traditional hymns.
“Hymns are somewhat in danger, but not as much as they were five years ago,” said Phillip Carter, a gospel artist and internet host. Along with social media programs that showcase hymns, Carter believes Winans’s album will “help a lot more people learn the hymns, and it will be nostalgic for those who already know them.”
It’s part of a larger aim for Winans, 61, who is considering how to pass along to younger audiences the timeless wisdom she received from her elders. Later this month, she and her daughter, Ashley, will lead Generations Live, their fifth annual women’s conference in Nashville, and release a book of devotionals. Both, she said, focus on the importance of hearing the word of God every day. “When the storms of life happen, you will be able to stand and remain strong mentally, physically and spiritually,” she said.
Winans has come to relish stillness. She remains the flagship artist of PureSprings Gospel, the label she formed in 1999, but acknowledges that she’s slowed her touring schedule, however slightly. “I used to do five and six shows a week. Now if I’m going to tour, it has to be maybe three days tops, that’s all my voice can take, and then I have to come back home and recharge.” In 2021, she and husband, Alvin Love II, turned over the lead pastorate of Nashville Life Church, which they founded in 2012, to their son, Alvin III. That has freed up time to spend with their four grandchildren, whom she refers to as “the sunshine of my life.”
Still, Winans has recently faced a few tumults online. Last December, when her younger sister Debbie performed a tribute to Gloria Gaynor at the Kennedy Center Honors, CeCe’s congratulatory Instagram post came under attack for seeming to support the Trump administration, which had just overhauled the institution’s board of directors.
Winans said she hadn’t anticipated the outcry over her post and wasn’t aware of the firestorm surrounding the event. “I didn’t even think about it. If you start thinking about what people might say or might do, then you can’t live and be who you are. But it didn’t discourage me in supporting my sister and being proud of her.”
Lately, Winans and her team have been busy fending off A.I.-generated images on social media spreading false rumors about the singer and her family. One depicted Winans fainting at a concert; another incorrectly reported her mother had died. “They even had me having twins — at age 61,” Winans laughed. “I’m like twins? So Sarah and Abraham, God is doing that again?”
She added that fans’ positive messages break through, too, citing a pastor who said “The Hymns” had been helping him sleep every night since the death of his son. Seeing the pastor’s text, “I began to weep because this is what people need. Everything else is great, but there are times when the right song in the right tone hits you where the heart needs it most.”
