00:00More than a musical genre, gospel is essentially a spiritual tradition, a lifestyle.
00:06When you hear that someone has abandoned gospel to sing something else, it is important to know
00:10whether the person in question has renounced that tradition or is just adding something else to
00:15their repertoire. Singers like Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey always understood
00:20that they never left gospel to sing pop. Aretha Franklin believed that the gospel was an integral
00:26part of her life and that she took the church wherever she went. I started very young, that's
00:31what I was going to say. In your dad's church? Mm-hmm. Uh, 12, 13. Doing gospel? Yes. Is it still your favorite music? Yes. It's, uh, an eight part of me. An integral part of me. Do you still sing every Sunday? Not every, but, uh, when I get the opportunity. When you go, you still sing at your, at your dad's church? Yes. Yeah? Uh-huh. I'll always go to church.
00:55Mm-hmm. And I don't have to be in the building to go to church. Whitney Houston also believed that the gospel was not just at the roots and origins, but that it was something that lasted throughout life. A lot of our great singers in America are gospel singers. They are gospel singers. They don't just sing gospel and say, oh, I'm going to sing pop. It goes on, it lingers, and it goes through their careers. They take it everywhere they go.
01:20Mariah Carey, as a pop singer, never abandoned gospel.
01:25I listen to a lot of gospel music in my spare time, more than I listen to pop or R&B even, and I think that that's shown up a lot in my writing.
01:34You know, so it's something that I was, I was, I felt blessed to be given, um, uh, the ability just, you know, writing songs comes from God,
01:42So for me, it's about giving back and making sure that, uh, that that comes across and that people can feel something and maybe learn something that'll help them as a, as a person.
01:52Because I know there are a lot of gospel songs that have helped me as a person.
01:55In her autobiography, Mariah said that she learned from Aretha.
01:59When she was in her late teens, she moved from singing gospel to jazz, or rather, she added jazz to her repertoire because she never moved from gospel.
02:09One of my favorite albums of hers is still gospel, One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism.
02:14And when she sang standards, there was nothing at all standard about her delivery.
02:20She brought a soulfulness to everything that was all her own.
02:24When Aretha departed this world, Mariah wrote about her on her Instagram.
02:29You showed me I could sing the songs I wanted to sing and bring God with me.
02:33You've inspired millions everywhere yet never left home, never left church.
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