Richard Smallwood, a singer-songwriter and pianist who became a chart-topping stalwart of gospel music, writing songs that were performed by artists including Destiny’s Child and Whitney Houston, died Dec. 30 at a nursing center in Sandy Spring, Maryland. He was 77.
The cause was complications of kidney failure, said his publicist Bill Carpenter.
A longtime Washingtonian who fused music and ministry, Mr. Smallwood wrote uplifting, classically informed church songs that spread a message of faith and love. He was perhaps best known for “Total Praise,” a church choir staple covered by Destiny’s Child and Stevie Wonder, and “I Love the Lord,” a soaring anthem that Houston popularized on the soundtrack of the 1996 film “The Preacher’s Wife.”
As a songwriter, Mr. Smallwood crafted melodies that bridged past and present, reflecting his upbringing in the church (he played piano for his stepfather’s Baptist congregations); his love of baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach; and his interest in the Motown soul that blanketed the radio in his youth.
Even with those pop influences, he considered himself far more than an entertainer.
“This is not about making money,” he told The Washington Post in 2015. “It’s about winning souls and encouraging people through Christ. He takes care of it all.”
Mr. Smallwood was 33 when he signed his first record deal, with Benson Records and its Christian music subsidiary Onyx. His debut album, 1982’s “The Richard Smallwood Singers,” spent 87 weeks on the Billboard gospel chart, while his follow-up, “Psalms,” brought him his first of eight Grammy nominations.
Over the decades, Mr. Smallwood won top honors in gospel music, including several Dove and Stellar Awards. He performed for three presidents — Nixon, Reagan and Clinton — and became the rare gospel artist to tour the Soviet Union. In 2006, he was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame.
Mr. Smallwood’s smooth, assured voice anchored many songs that took on lives of their own, while his abilities behind the piano were steeped in his classical training at Howard University.
“No matter what genre he’s playing, in his music the piano is the prominent feature,” Jacquie Gales Webb, a longtime gospel radio host at WHUR, once said. “That’s how you know it’s a Richard Smallwood song.”
While his music was often triumphant, Mr. Smallwood privately battled depression, and drew on his personal sorrows to write one of his biggest hits. “Total Praise,” released in 1996 with his gospel group Vision, was inspired by his experience caring for his mother, who had dementia, and for a family friend, who had cancer. Mr. Smallwood said he had decided “to write a pity-party song,” but found himself praising God instead, crafting lyrics that reasserted his faith in a moment of despair.
“In gospel, with this focus on celebration and praise, there can be an emotional narrowness to what people get to sing about,” said musicologist Braxton Shelley, author of “Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination,” in an interview for this obituary. “But Smallwood’s pen has room for pain and hurt and sorrow and anguish and melancholy.”
With its undercurrent of religious conviction, “Total Praise” has appeared in unexpected settings. When Destiny’s Child were arranging a gospel medley to conclude their 2001 album “Survivor,” singer Michelle Williams suggested ending the album with a snippet from the song, in which a triumphant choir builds on the word “Amen.” After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, the family of one of the victims asked for the song to be performed at her funeral. “Total Praise” has even transcended religious barriers, with a New Jersey choir translating the song into Hebrew for a Jewish choral festival.
“Smallwood speaks of ‘mountaintop praise’ — celebrating God when all is well — and ‘valley praise,’ thanking God in the bleakest moments of life,” wrote Doug Peck, a conductor and teacher, in a 2021 tribute for the New York Times. With “Total Praise,” he said, Mr. Smallwood “brought strength to millions of listeners,” especially in the song’s “Amen” section — “a musical and spiritual achievement on par with anything Bach left us.”
A family legacy of music and faith
Richard Lee Smallwood was born in Atlanta on Nov. 30, 1948. He was raised by his mother, Mabel, who worked odd jobs, and by his stepfather, Chester, a pastor who established Union Temple Baptist Church in Washington, where the family settled when Mr. Smallwood was 10.
In his 2019 autobiography, “Total Praise,” Mr. Smallwood recalled that he was a mediocre student and said that he was regularly beaten by his stepfather. But he found a creative outlet through music, soaking up Motown records, Barbra Streisand hits and musical theater standards from Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Mr. Smallwood formed his first gospel group at age 11, singing with kids from the neighborhood. As an eighth-grader at Browne Junior High, he studied under a future giant of popular music, Roberta Flack. As a teenager, he was admitted to a precollege training program at Howard that offered him a classical grounding in piano.
“Bach soon took a hold of me,” Mr. Smallwood wrote in his autobiography, adding that the “master of counterpoint and thematic improvisation became and still is my absolute favorite composer.”
At Howard, Mr. Smallwood studied alongside music students including Donny Hathaway, the soul singer, and helped form the university’s gospel choir. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1971 and returned to get a master’s in musicology and piano.
By the end of the 1970s, Mr. Smallwood was touring with the Richard Smallwood Singers, who featured some of the vocalists he led in the young adult choir at Union Temple Baptist Church. He started a successor group, Vision, in 1995.
Mr. Smallwood, who never married, came to describe the ensemble as his family. He is survived by two brothers and three foster sisters.
In his autobiography, Mr. Smallwood wrote of his years-long struggle with depression, including a period in the late 1990s when he struggled to get out of bed and regularly thought of suicide.
A turning point came in 2010, when he had a dream about his late stepfather. They were walking down a street together and stopped to listen to music. When Mr. Smallwood woke up, he broke down in tears. The dream alleviated the pain of his relationship with his stepfather, he said, and cured him of his depression.
“It was God’s way of healing me of some of the things I was dealing with,” Mr. Smallwood said.
Over time, Mr. Smallwood said he began to understand that many of the most enduring works of praise have come from a place of sorrow.
“Songs of pain last,” he told The Post in 2015. “They make a difference. My prayer has always been, ‘Give me songs that last.’ I want my songs to last after I’m gone.”
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