Richard Smallwood, Grammy-nominated gospel singer-composer, has died

WASHINGTON — Richard Smallwood, a D.C. native and eight-time Grammy nominated singer-composer has died. Smallwood’s publicist said the musician passed away just after midnight Tuesday due to kidney failure at the Brooke Grove Rehabilitation and Nursing Center. He was 77 years old. 

Over the past five decades, Smallwood has written some notable songs like “I Love the Lod” which Whitney Houston remade with the Georgia Mass Choir for 1996’s The Preacher’s Wife soundtrack and Boyz II Men’s 1997 album, Evolution, closed with a song “Dear God” that included a refrain of it. His song “Total Praise” was also covered by Destiny’s Child on their 2007 acapella track, “Gospel Medley.”

Smallwood was born on Nov. 30, 1948 in Atlanta but was raised in D.C. by his mother Mabel and his stepfather Rev. Chester Lee “CL” Smallwood who was pastor of Union Temple Baptist Church in southeast D.C.

He began to play piano by ear by the age of 5. By 7, he was taking formal lessons and by 11, had formed his own gospel group. 

He attended McKinley Technology High School in northeast. Singer and pianist Roberta Flack was one of his high school teachers before she launched her recording career with Atlantic Records. 

He graduated cum laude from Howard University with a degree in music. He studied alongside Donny Hathaway, Debbie Allen, and Phylicia Rashad. He was also a member of Howard’s first gospel group, the Celestials, who were the first gospel group to sing at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. Smallwood was also one of the founding members of Howard University’s Gospel Choir. After college, Smallwood taught music at University of Maryland.

He founded the Richard Smallwood Singers in 1977 after seeing Edwin Hawkins Singers perform live. The group was made up of Dottie Jones, Jackie Ruffin, Darlene Simmons and Smallwood himself. 

The group brought a progressive, contemporary sound to gospel music. They performed throughout the D.C. area before they were signed to Onyx Records which was the Black gospel division of Benson Records in 1982. Their debut LP The Richard Smallwood Singers, spent 87 weeks on Billboard magazine’s Spiritual Albums sales chart. 

Their 1984 LP, Psalms, hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Spiritual albums sales chart and earned them a Grammy award nomination. They moved over to Word Records’ Rejoice black division for the 1987 LP, Textures, which peaked at No. 7 on the same chart and produced the biggest hit of the group’s career with the ballad, “Center of My Joy.” It was the first song to introduce Smallwood to the white Christian community and has since been covered by artists as diverse as Ron Kenoly, Tanya Goodman-Sykes, and the Sensational Nightingales. The group’s popularity led to an invitation to perform in the Soviet Union which was reportedly the first gospel group to do a concert tour of the country at the time in the late 1980s. 

“I’ve been with every major gospel label that there is,” Smallwood once said. “I’ve been able to compare different labels and the way that things are done – the support or lack of. I’ve been in the position of the new kid on the block, where the importance or focus was put on the names that were known better than I was at the time, and all the energy was put on them….the label just did not give me the support, and that’s a frustrating feeling because you have a lot of ideas and concepts that you’d like to see, and you go to the label and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this idea about marketing or promotion’ and they say ‘Well, we’ll see’ and they just kind of put [the record] out there, and if it makes it, it makes it on its own, without any serious support from the label. I’ve been there.”

Once the group landed at Jive/Verity Records, now RCA Inspiration, he disbanded the Smallwood Singers and formed a large backing choir named Vision that he featured on a string of albums that produced gospel radio hits such as “Angels” and “Total Praise.” 

“My mother was ill and my god brother was terminally ill with brain cancer,” he told a reporter on the red carpet at the 2014 BMI Trailblazer Awards where he was honored. “So, I was feeling helpless in terms of what I could do as a caregiver. And God just sort of gave me that song in the middle of all that which really gave me a peace about the whole thing and let me know that he was still in control of the situation. So, it came to me in a very difficult time of my life, but certainly I had no idea it was going to have the impact that it had.”

Smallwood’s 2007 album, Journey: Live in New York, featured performances from Chaka Khan, The Hawkins Family, Kelly Price and Kim Burrell. Smallwood’s final album, Anthology, was released in 2015 and featured the Gospel radio hit, “Same God.” In 2019, Smallwood published a book, Total Praise: The Autobiography, which detailed family secrets and his personal battles with grief and depression. 

His last years were also spent battling mild dementia and other health issues. “I don’t know that I have all the answers or any of the answers,” he once said in a 1993 Washington Post interview. “But being a minister of music, I need to be open to listen and give a word of encouragement through songs of testimony. Singing is only part of it. The ministry itself is much more than that.”

Smallwood is survived by his brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews and several godchildren.