Rose Baptist Church adult choir near Dallas.
A natural musician who could sight-read and play by ear with equal facility, Franklin received his first contract offer at the age of seven, which his aunt promptly turned down. When he was four years old, his aunt paid for his piano lessons by collecting aluminum cans.
He remains a perennial chart success and a frequent Grammy winner, proven repeatedly with Top 20, award-winning albums such as Hero (2005), Hello Fear (2011), Losing My Religion (2015), and Long Live Love (2019).Ībandoned by his mother and having never known his father, Franklin was raised in Fort Worth, Texas, by his Aunt Gertrude, a deeply religious woman who maintained a strict Baptist household. Franklin's fondness for collaborations within secular and Christian music circles, and his innate knack for combining charismatic gospel with R&B and hip-hop, has continued to appeal to a wide audience. This broad appeal would prove to be a recurring theme in Franklin's collaborations with the Family (1996's Whatcha Lookin' 4) and another choir, God's Property (1998's The Nu Nation Project), as well as in his subsequent solo career, which he started with The Rebirth of Kirk Franklin (2002). 1 on the Gospel chart.One of contemporary gospel music's brightest and most enduring stars, singer, songwriter, and producer Kirk Franklin emerged in the early '90s leading the Texas-based choir the Family, whose platinum-selling debut, Kirk Franklin & the Family (1993), proved not only to be a chart-topping gospel success, but crossed over to the R&B and pop charts as well. His solo debut album, 2002's The Rebirth of Kirk Franklin, was an immediate crossover hit, topping Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop albums chart while also hitting No. Franklin went solo in 2001, first scoring and producing the film soundtrack Kingdom Come. He continued to sing in his church choir, and signed his first recording contract when he was in his early 20s, after organizing the 17-member choir Kirk Franklin and the Family in 1992. Franklin's musical talent was evident from a very young age he was offered his first record deal at age 7, but the aunt who raised him turned it down. He's brought a more contemporary spin to the genre, and has found success by infusing his music with elements of modern soul, R&B and hip-hop. Over the course of his two-decade music career, Texas native Franklin has been broadening the reach and scope of Gospel music. Fans who bought tickets to those concerts saw Franklin perform on a package tour dubbed The King's Men Tour with Donny McClurkin, Marvin Sapp and Israel Houghton. Multi-platinum Gospel singer Kirk Franklin ended 2013 by appearing at Nelson Mandela's memorial service in Johannesburg, singing his hit "My Life is in Your Hands." It capped a relatively quiet year compared to the year prior, which saw Franklin on tour in support of his Grammy-winning 2011 release, Hello Fear, his fifth solo album.