reciting his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech came on. “I was watching television with Mamma when a rerun of Martin Luther King Jr. He was only around 4 years old when he told Mamma he wanted to be a preacher. Although Gertrude was up in age, she took young Kirk to Mount Rose Baptist Church religiously during his early years.
Long before there were any multimillion-dollar recording contracts and throngs of admirers scurrying to concerts to watch him perform, Franklin was known simply as “Gertrude’s boy.” His elderly aunt, Gertrude Franklin, whom he calls Mamma, adopted him when his biological mother abandoned him. Now that his problems are behind him, he refers to that time in his life as the “wilderness,” from which he says he has emerged.
“What was happening” were two lawsuits that plagued his ministry, and a private struggle with pornography. But privately, I couldn’t enjoy it because of what was happening,” Franklin told Charisma. The response to the albums was big–I mean extremely big. Internal struggles led to the breakup of his group and other problems. Though the Fort Worth, Texas, native admits he’s not the world’s best singer, many consider him a songwriter par excellence.īut at the height of his career, in the 1990s, Franklin’s Midas-touch success had to endure the Refiner’s fire. “Why We Sing,” from his first album, remained on the magazine’s Gospel charts for 100 weeks.Īnd Franklin’s strong crossover draw with mainstream listeners also has landed him on the cover of secular publications such as Vibe and Jet magazines. 4 on Billboard magazine’s R&B/Hip-Hop singles chart. With mostly platinum and multiplatinum albums under his belt, every project this songwriter has put his hands to has turned either gold or platinum. Whether or not that was when he first started pointing people to God, he’s certainly been doing it ever since. Now 33, Franklin is just as busy praising God as he was when he first showed talent in Christian music at the age of 4. One by one his hit songs helped erode discriminatory walls of religion and tradition in the church, and it all happened by the time he was 30.
Kirk Franklin, the self-described “church boy”–as he titled his 1998 autobiography–has taken his zeal for God and coupled it with R&B and hip-hop musical styles and caused a revolution. His smash hit “Stomp” from the triple-platinum album God’s Property (1997) landed him in heavy rotation on MTV–at the time, a feat practically unheard of in Christian music circles. He’s a three-time Grammy Award winner, a seven-time Dove Award winner and a 20-time Stellar Award winner. He has sold more than 10 million albums in less than a decade. Now he’s enjoying a spiritual transformation. The popular gospel recordng star endured a painful season that included lawsuits and a struggle with pornography.
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