Church Boy

by Kirk Franklin

  What an incredible experience it turned out to be! I can’t even put into words all the feelings and emotions I was going through as I flew to Washington, D.C., and saw the nation’s capital for the first time. I took a taxi from National Airport to the theater downtown where we would be working and was thrilled to finally meet all the incredibly talented musicians and singers who had come in from all over the country.

  It was awesome! Not only were we going to record my song on a major label but they were paying me fifteen hundred dollars just to be there. For a young man in my situation, that was serious money.

  To cap it off, I knew that Milton Biggham liked my stuff and wanted to use me as one of his music leaders. At one point, he put his arm around my shoulder and said, “You’re a good man, Kirk Franklin. You’re a good musician, and I could use somebody like you.”

  He didn’t offer me a lot of money or a big recording contract or anything like that, but he said he would let me hang around with him and sort of be his “boy.” In that venue, that was like a stamp of approval from one of the most important men in the business. I knew this could be a big break for me.

  I said, “I’ll stick to you like glue, Mr. Biggham, if that’s what you want.”

  All that week, the word got around that Kirk Franklin was Milton Biggham’s boy. Everywhere he went, I was there. When he needed somebody on the piano, I played. When he said frog, I jumped! Consequently, my stock started going up, and the girls started hanging around with me. They all thought I was the new “Big Willie”!

  First thing Monday morning, Milton said, “Kirk, I want you to rehearse the choir and teach them your song. Will you do that?” The only song of mine he really knew was “Every Day with Jesus,” which we had performed in Dallas. But he liked it, and for him, that was my trademark song.

  Altogether, there were three thousand singers, songwriters, pianists, and directors from all over the world in the performance hall that day. By the time they were assembled and ready, I was pretty nervous. I wasn’t at Mount Rose Baptist anymore. This was the National Mass Choir in Washington, D.C., and I was supposed to go out there in front of all those people and teach them my song!

  I thought I was going to choke, and that’s just what I did.

  When I got out on stage in front of all those wonderful, highly experienced veteran musicians and singers, I was weak in the knees. I started by telling them a little bit about the song and how I would like to go through it. Then I played it through one time on the piano.

  But as soon as I stood up to start teaching it, I completely lost it. I mean, I was stuttering and bumbling and making a fool of myself, and everybody standing up there on the risers must have thought I was a total idiot. Nothing worked, and the sound was all wrong.

  Finally, I just stopped, put down the music and said, “People, I’m sorry. I’m new at this, and I’ve got to tell you, I’m so nervous being out here in front of so many great musicians, I’m just making a fool of myself. I want you to know how embarrassed I am. Will you please forgive me?”

  All of a sudden, it was like they had fallen in love with me. They could see that I was young, and I guess they felt sorry for me. Or maybe they just appreciated my honesty. But they started laughing and smiling and encouraging me.

  One man up in the middle of the choir said, “Hey, Kirk, don’t you worry about it, son. Let’s just sing the song. You’re going to do just fine.”

  Well, I took a deep breath and went back to the music, and sure enough, it went very well after that. In fact, it went great. By the time we finished rehearsing, everybody thought I was great. They were patting me on the back and thanking me for being there, and they made me feel like a hero for a little while.

  Man, I was the Howard Hughes of gospel music that day! The rest of the day the word got out: “That’s the kid who taught everybody his song, and he’s bad!” Of course that meant, He’s good!

  I couldn’t believe it. Everywhere I went after that, people would speak to me and smile, and I could hear them talking about “that nice young man who led the choir.” By this time, the girls really thought I was hot, and they wanted to hang with me.

  I was enjoying all that, and it was really a great week. Then Friday night came, and it was my turn to lead the choir again. We were going to record “Every Day with Jesus,” so I went back onstage with my music and got everything ready.

  But what happened with me blowing up that big was that I got the big head. I had been walking around signing autographs and hanging out, and I didn’t go back and review my song until Thursday night. Man, I got up at the rehearsal and absolutely flopped. I wasn’t really worried about it, though, because we had done it so well on Monday. I figured we could do it again. But on Friday night at the actual recording session we did the number, and it was horrible!

  The song didn’t work, and it died a slow, horrible, painful death. It was obvious to everybody, not just me, that something wasn’t right. I couldn’t keep the singers together, and they kept missing entrances. Besides that, the band was doing stuff I had never even heard before, and it was turning out all wrong.

  Suddenly everybody realized the kid had blown it, and the proof was right there in living stereo for the whole world to hear! I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I said good-bye and thank you. Then I walked back to my hotel and just lay down in the bed and sobbed.

  A FUTURE AND A HOPE

  Fortunately, when I got back home to Fort Worth nobody knew anything about my big blowup. They only knew that I had been up to direct the National Mass Choir in Washington, D.C., and everybody thought that was really cool.

  It didn’t take long for me to realize that things were going to be different from now on. People knew me as the guy who had played for Milton Biggham. I had also played for V. Michael McKay when he did his workshop in Dallas. So whenever the big names came to town to do a workshop, I was one of the ones they called.

  All the big national gospel artists were coming through Dallas/Fort Worth, too, and I was one who would come over to play for them. Before long I was teaching all the songs I had been writing since 1987 to community choirs and gospel workshops in Texas and many other places all over the country. I was going from coast to coast and loving every minute of it.

  The girls back home were starting to warm up to me too. They were all into the gospel music scene, and since I had made such a miserable flop on the D.C. recording, I thought it was going to go back to the usual. But they didn’t know anything about that. They just knew I’d been up to GMWA, and my star was shining as bright as ever.

  I still didn’t have my life together, though. By the time I got back from D.C., I had already moved out of Gerald’s house. I was only there a short time, but I’d worn out my welcome. So I moved in with another friend. Between July 1989 and November 1990, I moved at least twelve times, and I didn’t have anything close to a regular life during all that time.

  On the music side, however, things were warming up. Other than V. Michael McKay and Yolanda Adams, plus a few more, I was one of the only ones from Texas who had been involved in the GMWA recordings. Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Atlanta were the big venues for gospel music; but here I was in Fort Worth with at least a foot in the door and traveling most of the time. Thanks to my friendship with Milton Biggham, I was starting to make some moves.

  In the process, I was also able to move from being a piano player to being a director. I was getting a bit of a reputation for that. One reason people would ask me to direct is that I was a clown. In a lot of choirs, the director is more or less invisible, but in gospel music, the director is part of the show. He does stuff and moves around a lot. So I would get up and entertain the people, and they enjoyed it.

  I remember a couple of times I even directed with my feet! I would stomp or jump up on a certain downbeat. Sometimes I would kick my foot in the air, and the drums would make a loud pop and stuff like that. People who had been brought up on straight gospel music got a kick out of my a
ntics on stage—no pun intended!

  But there I was, in the odd situation of getting a little bit of exposure and popularity and a little bit of a reputation while my life was still a mess. I didn’t have a place to live, and I was still wrestling with all kinds of insecurities and the flesh. But because I was known as Milton’s boy, people were treating me with respect.

  Over the next several months, Milton Biggham gave me the chance to travel with him, and that took care of my living arrangements as long as I was on the road. During the week I was Milton’s piano player, and on weekends I would be back home directing two choirs and leading the music at two different churches.

  With GMWA workshops going on all the time in cities all over the country, I was starting to get a lot of calls to lead workshops on my own, and before long I realized that I needed to start praying about starting my own group. I had been keeping track of some of the singers I had known over the years, so I started calling a few of them to see whether or not they might be interested in doing something with me.

  One of the first people I called was a young woman I had known at Mount Rose Baptist when I was just eleven years old. She was interested, and she’s still with me today as a singer with the Family. Eventually I had a core group of fifteen regulars on board.

  Along the way one of my songs was used without authorization by a guy named Bubba who put it on an album with a North Carolina choir. I eventually recorded it with the Georgia Mass Choir. Oddly enough, a few years later I got a call from a Hollywood producer who said he’d heard my song “Every Day with Jesus” on an album I did with Georgia Mass, and he liked what he heard.

  Years after Bubba took my song and used it on his North Carolina album, these people heard it, liked it, and selected it for the soundtrack of their movie The Preacher’s Wife, starring Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston. Fortunately, this time my name was on it.

  Melodies from heaven

  Rain down on me, rain down on me;

  Take me in Your arms and hold me close

  Rain down on me, rain down on me;

  Fill me with your precious Holy Ghost

  Rain down on me, rain down on me.

  Words and music by Kirk Franklin.

  Copyright © 1995, Kerrion Publishing / Lilly Mack Publishing (BMI).

  Used by permission.

  7

  Melodies from Heaven

  It was a Wednesday night in November of 1990. I was not living at home, but would call to check on Gertrude regularly. This particular night she did not answer, which seemed strange, because it was late and she was eighty years old. I felt something was wrong, so I called my best friend Jon Drummond to go with me to check on my mother. When we got there, the lights were off and the dog she always kept in the house was outside. My continued knocking and screaming that received no answer made me panic, and soon I woke up the neighbors. The neighbors called the fire department. When they arrived, I’ll never forget their words as they flashed their flashlights through her window. “There is someone in the bed asleep.” I don’t remember how I felt then or what I was thinking. All I knew is that night I lost my Mama!

  Gertrude’s death was hard for me. That old woman had taken me in and loved me when my own mother walked away. She held me close and told me I was somebody. She made sure I understood that Jesus loved me and that everything else was going to be okay.

  She fed me, clothed me, took me wherever I needed to go in her old car, and never resented doing whatever she had to do to help me have a better life, no matter how trivial or demeaning it might be—even picking up aluminum cans along the roadside so she could afford to pay Mrs. Jackson for my music lessons.

  When Gertrude passed away, part of me rejoiced for her because I knew with all my heart that she was going to a better place. But for the other part of me, the human part, that was one of the most heart-breaking moments of my life.

  Sitting alone in my room one night months later, after coming home from a very successful performance, I found myself drawn into a quiet, gentle reverie. Before I knew it, I was literally overcome by a wave of nostalgia about those early years, growing up in our rough Riverside neighborhood in West Fort Worth.

  I realized that it was Gertrude who should get most of the credit for all the good things that were beginning to happen for me. After all, she had been the one who had worked so hard to get me where I was. She had always been there, waiting up for me, praying for me, jacking me up when I needed it, but always trying to keep my eyes focused on Jesus.

  As I looked around the room that night, I saw musical programs and tapes and CDs of all kinds, each one reminding me of the things I had done and the places I’d been as a musician. I was on the verge of becoming a national recording artist and a successful performer. There was a new momentum in my life and career at that time. But what stood out in my memory was not my achievements and not the discord or the disappointments of the last few years. It was all the good times and all the happy memories of my youth.

  I remembered driving home from church one night in Gertrude’s old car when I was no more than seven or eight years old. We had been to a musical program at Corinth Church, and I was really excited about it.

  Corinth Church was a well-known gospel church; it put on musicals that were monsters. When they put on their annual choir concerts, practically every gospel fan in Fort Worth showed up. It was just a tiny church, but when that place started rocking, there was rejoicing in heaven!

  The guy who put it all together was an incredible musician named Sammy Samington, and he was one big boy, weighing in at four hundred pounds or better. He was over all the choirs, and he had a very contemporary style.

  I never realized I had a heart for gospel music before that night, but all the way home from church I couldn’t stop talking. I was blown away by what we had just heard, and I knew then that, somehow or other, I was going to be involved in gospel music. I had been interested in it before that in a small way but mainly because it was part of my culture and heritage. I liked the sound. But that night I realized that I had a serious interest in doing gospel music.

  What made it so special was that everybody at Corinth Church was a singer. The congregation was known for that; literally everybody at that church had pipes.

  Gertrude talked to Sammy about my playing, and on one occasion, he let me play a song at one of the youth musicals. His concept was to make every number a big production number; for that number he had me on the piano, another little boy on the organ, and a friend of mine on the drums. So it was like a little jamfest.

  The major musicals were put on by the adult choir, and they were just awesome. Many years before, after coming home from one of those musicals, I slipped into bed and lay there with the window open, just thinking about all we’d seen. We didn’t have air conditioning in those days, so I just lay there with the breeze blowing through the window and started humming the melody to Elton John’s song, “Benny and the Jets.”

  The song was being played on all the radio stations at that time. I could hear the melody in my head, but I had my own words. I started singing to myself, “He’s coming back. He’s coming back. I know the Bible says He’s coming back!” And little by little, I put the whole song together in my mind. That was the first time I can actually remember doing anything like that.

  There were lots of things that brought melodies and words to my mind when I was a little kid. I remembered those times, so long ago. Once again I was that little kid sitting up on the roof late at night, staring up at the stars, humming songs and singing to myself. I was trying to figure out what it all meant, what was going on with my life. Sometimes I would be sitting up there, crying, singing, touching heaven, and hoping it would all come out right in the end.

  Why did I do that? I don’t know. Maybe I thought I could make sense of it all if I sat up there long enough. Maybe I was trying to reach up and grab a little piece of eternity with my thoughts and my prayers. There would be many times over the next few years w
hen I would let life get the best of me—times when I couldn’t keep up with all my responsibilities. Most things in my life came so fast and so unexpectedly I made a mess of a lot of them.

  But there was one important fact I couldn’t escape. It was impossible. It couldn’t happen in the real world. But somehow or other, Gertrude Franklin had made her little lost boy into a gospel singer.

  ONCE FROM THE TOP

  By the time I turned twenty-two years old in 1992 I had written several songs for other choirs to record, but I really wanted to come up with my own thing. I felt compelled to try something, so I decided to get together with several friends I’d known for a long time.

  I called Tam, David, Mousey, Dalon, Theresa, Keisha, Chris, Darryl, Byron, Mona, Cassie, Yolanda, Dee, Stephanie, Jeanette, Sheila, and Jon Drummond, and we all got together for a trial run. I wanted to know if they thought we should try to do something together; I wanted to see if we could start some kind of group. They thought it was a good idea, and all of them said they wanted to give it a try.

  Our first rehearsal was in April 1992 in the recreation room at the apartments where I lived, and we caused quite a commotion. Neighbors were coming outside to listen. Others were hanging out the windows, saying, “Hey, what is all that singing?” Before we finished that first meeting, we knew that God was doing something. We could see that our audience was enjoying what it heard, and that was a sign of encouragement.

  Over the years there have been a lot of other singers who have played an important part in the group. Some had other jobs or interests that took them away. Some have gone on to musical careers of their own apart from this group. In some cases they’ve had a different idea about where we were going or what our sound should be like.

  But the group we have today grew out of that first meeting, and when I named the group the “Family,” it was because those people truly are my family. I dearly love them. In a sense, they’re all the family I’ve ever known.