A church choir recorded “Oh Happy Day” for a fundraising album. It became a worldwide pop hit
Nobody expected the Northern California State Youth Choir to have a hit record. They made an album to raise money for a trip.
In 1967, the choir, directed by the young pianist and arranger Edwin Hawkins, recorded an album in a church in Berkeley, California. They pressed a few hundred copies to sell to raise funds for a youth congress. One of the tracks was Hawkins’s arrangement of an old hymn, “Oh Happy Day”, with Dorothy Morrison singing the lead.
From hymn to hit
The words go back to the eighteenth century English minister Philip Doddridge, whose hymn about the day of conversion was sung in churches for generations with a different refrain. Hawkins stripped it down to a few repeated lines over a relaxed rhythm with piano, drums and a swelling choir.
A copy of the album found its way to a San Francisco radio station, where a DJ played “Oh Happy Day”. Listeners called in, other stations picked it up, and a record label released it as a single under the name the Edwin Hawkins Singers.
The charts
In 1969, the song climbed to number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and number two in the UK, and it sold millions of copies around the world. It won the Grammy Award for Best Soul Gospel Performance in 1970.
Some church members were uneasy about a gospel song on pop radio and in nightclubs. Others saw it as the gospel reaching people who would never enter a church.
A standard
“Oh Happy Day” became one of the most recorded gospel songs. The choir scene in the 1993 film Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, with Lauryn Hill and a school choir, introduced it to a new generation. Choirs from Accra to Stockholm perform it, and it is often the first gospel song that non-church choirs learn.
Edwin Hawkins
Hawkins went on to a long career as a gospel artist, producer and founder of the Edwin Hawkins Music and Arts Seminar, a gathering for church musicians. His brother Walter Hawkins also became a leading gospel figure. Edwin Hawkins died in January 2018.
Why it worked
The song’s power is its simplicity. It has a few lines, easy to learn and easy to sing along with. The joy of the text needs no explanation.
A fundraising record made by teenagers in a church became the song that carried gospel into the pop charts. The trip they were saving for turned out to be the smallest part of the story.
