Gospel music legend Richard Smallwood passed on to his heavenly home last week. He was 77.
Smallwood’s representative announced that he passed away on December 30 due to complications from kidney failure in Maryland.
“Richard was so dedicated to music, and that was the thing that kept him alive all these years,” his representative Bill Carpenter said. “Making music that made people feel something is what made him want to keep breathing and keep moving and keep living.”
Smallwood had faced health challenges for years, but his dedication to music kept him going. Known for his biggest hit “Total Praise,” he also collaborated with the likes of Quincy Jones and Aretha Franklin, and his songs were recorded by top artists such as Whitney Houston and Destiny’s Child.
The eight-time Grammy-nominated gospel singer was a 1971 graduate of Howard University and one of the Howard Gospel Choir’s founding members.
Born to Praise
Smallwood performed on the world stage for decades, and his love of music developed while he was still in diapers and in a crib.
“My mother tells the story that before I could talk … when I could come home from church on Sunday mornings, I would hum whatever hymn they sang at church,” Smallwood told CBN News back in 2016. “So when I was two, [my parents] brought me a toy baby grand piano, and I would bang rhythms on the piano and hum.”
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His stepfather was a Baptist preacher who played the piano. “By the time I was 7, I was playing for his church,” Smallwood recalled.
But it was his mother, Mabel R. Smallwood, who helped him develop an ear for all kinds of music, exposing him to everything from classical to jazz to opera to show tunes and a variety of artists like Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Rachmaninoff, and the Roberta Martin Singers.
“I was growing up this little kid with all these crazy tastes,” he told CBN News.
From a small kids’ choir, which he to this day affectionately refers to as the “Baby Smallwood Singers,” to his ensemble “Vision,” Smallwood earned multiple Grammy nominations, Dove Awards, Stellar Awards, and a spot in the Gospel Music Hall of Fame.
In September 2015, his popular anthem “Total Praise” was performed for Pope Francis during a White House reception hosted by President Barack Obama. It was a moment he describes as amazing.
The maestro’s songs are sung the world over, instantly recognizable by the distinctive “Smallwood sound,” which can be described as a heavenly blend of soaring melodies expressed through the genre of traditional gospel music and infused with his years of classical training.
Dark Night of the Soul
Still, with all the acclaim and success, Smallwood, an ordained minister, stunned fans a decade ago when he revealed that his signature sound often came from a place of pain.
“It got to the point where I couldn’t get out of bed, I wouldn’t get in the shower,” Smallwood told CBN News at the time. “The only time I would sort of go out is if we had somewhere to sing.”
In the living room of his suburban Maryland home on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., he told CBN’s John Jessup that he started dealing with depression when he was around 30 years old.
The feeling of being overwhelmed increased after a series of tragedies that landed him in what he described as a “deep, dark well.” Those included the deaths of several close friends and learning in his adult years that the man he called “dad” from childhood was not his biological father.
“All of that was going on at the same time, and I just had to talk to somebody,” he explained.
He approached a minister from his church, who was also a licensed clinical psychologist. “After seeing me a while she said, ‘Richard, you’re 100 percent clinically depressed,'” Smallwood recalled.
The talks helped, but he remained in the dark hole.
“I had to get on medication, which was a major decision for me because I was afraid,” he said. “I heard so many horror stories. But it wasn’t getting any better.”
Hurting in Secret
Ironically, the same man who encouraged concertgoers with lyrics like “There’s healing for your sorrow, healing for your soul” says he felt like a fraud since those very words left him feeling unchanged.
“They’re coming up to me saying, ‘Your song saved me from this’ or ‘Your song ministered to me,’ and I’d go off the stage and go back to the hotel, close the door and I’m hurting,” Smallwood explained.
The pain intensified as he desperately tried to keep it hidden from everyone.
“It’s such a stigma. You’re ashamed,” he said. “I think, certainly, the Church doesn’t talk about it. And, certainly, my culture doesn’t talk about it. So it was sort of a double kind of thing. I didn’t want anybody to know.”
The Church’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’
Within the Christian community, depression has been called one of the Church’s “dirty little secrets” because the topic is considered taboo and often fraught with misconceptions and religious cultural barriers.
But it’s a serious mental illness that does not discriminate, affecting people both outside and inside the Church.
“Certainly having a relationship with Christ, where we understand our identity in Christ, can really deal with and correct some of the thinking errors that we have,” Dr. Christine Buckingham, a licensed clinical professional counselor, explained. “But it doesn’t make anyone immune, and we can look in Scripture and see many cases of depression.”
After revealing his struggle, Smallwood turned his attention to writing his autobiography, to discuss his life story, including his depression, in detail. The book was titled, Total Praise The Autobiography: Richard Smallwood.
