Fred Hammond

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1:33Welcome to the documentary on BBC World Service with me, Swazi Shuri, and I'm joined by gospel legend Fred Hammond. With a career spanning over four decades, starting from his time as a bass player for the gospel group The Winans, to join as one of the original members of the group commissioned, before stepping to the front to sing to lead the group Radical for Christ and beyond. Fred Hammond is synonymous with gospel music and has shaped the sound we know and love today. Fred has received 15 Grammy Awards and has toured around the world and his recent Tiny Desk concert shared on social media showed the impact his music has had.

2:12I have grown up loving gospel music and now I'm a radio presenter at BBC Radio 1 Extra and Radio 4 and I love that I get to interview gospel artists. For this two-part series on heart and soul, Last week, I spoke to Kirk Franklin to find out more about the man behind the music. And now I cannot wait to do the same with Fred. Like Kirk, Fred has been open over the years about the highs and lows he's faced. And I want to find out more about his life and personal faith journey to better understand what's influenced some of the biggest gospel songs in the world.

3:00How you doing? I'm good. I'm really, really good. Well, thank you so much for joining us. How did your journey of music and faith start? Started when I was very young. I didn't really want to be a singer. You know, when my mother, you know, when she was used to teach choirs at a lot of different churches. And so when I'm five or six, my mother brings home a record with these five dudes on there. and one of them was like seven and I was enamored with his voice and it was a Jackson 5. I was just singing along with it, you know, while my mother was cooking and singing Jermaine's part and his part and I just loved it and she said, you know, if you open your mouth, you can sing like that little boy, but I was too shy so I thought she was going to put me up at church and sing in front of all those people.

3:47So I picked up my little record player, went upstairs in the closet, shut the door, put it on the flashlight, and I sang it in the closet because I did not want her to put me up to in front of people. And so that's where I started. And we're from Motown. So we were just a music village. And then as I got older, I started playing drums. She would take me to choir rehearsals and I would play a little three piece set. And then as I got older, she told me that she saw that I was standing in line at the church to play drums and I wasn't getting an opportunity but the bass was just sitting over there in the corner nobody was messing with it so she said why don't you pick up something else I said well I like the bass a little bit I'll learn that and I started learning that next thing you know wham.

4:35Wham oh that's amazing but what was that transition then if you was quite a shy kid to step to the front and sing How did you know that the Lord was calling you to something maybe that you didn't even have planned? You know, the funny part was, even then, let's go back to elementary school. I'm in the third grade going to the fourth. And we were at this thing and the Jackson 5 was really hot. So they asked us to come up to the front of the class. They said, if you finish your work in time, we're going to dance and listen to music. You know, so everybody was cool. And so everybody got their work done and cleaned off the desk and all everything was done.

5:08so we had about 15 minutes of class and she said uh we got these kids these little boys right here jackson five cool cool and everybody wanted to hear them and they said we listened to the song one time and then the next thing you know she said well do we have a jackson five in here and so about eight of us ran up to the front like yeah and i remember this because regina one of the girls named i won't give her last name to embarrass her she was like sit down fred and she hollered me out sit down Fred Fred and sit down and I was like I was already shy but my boys was up there so as I was going to sit I took a step and then we were talking we were singing and singing and so we was doing the dancing you know we was doing all the stuff and making up the steps on the spot and George another friend named George he was Michael and he had charisma he could spin, he could sing, he could, he just, but when Jermaine's part came up on I'll Be There, I looked at Myron, Myron stepped out, and he looked at me, and I stepped out, and I just sang, and oh, I'll be there to comfort you, and I could mimic how people sounded, I didn't know that was singing, I didn't know I was singing, and all of a sudden, the next thing you know, Regina, the loudest

6:34one oh that's amazing that's incredible you've gone on to really shape the gospel sound we are so grateful for you

6:54I want to know why is gospel music so powerful what is it about the harmonies and what is it about the choirs that for someone like me that cannot sing I can't help but join in why is gospel music so powerful because it's the power of the unit like you know it's slightly different. If you hear somebody with a really beautiful voice and they're singing to you and you're listening, it can touch you. All right. And today's gospel music, gospel singers are the greatest, but they're doing a lot. They're really, they have a lot of skill. But once you acknowledge the scripture, magnify the Lord with me and let us exalt his name together, that comes alive.

7:33All of a sudden, once you start to sing the word of God, you start to be, you know, you feel the anointing, and then you're, and the person next to you, and then the person next to you, and the whole place is crying out, singing the same thing on one accord, that's when the Lord, he comes in, he said, I'm in the midst of your praises, and once you, it's about singing. When I write, when I left commission, one thing I did was I wanted to write songs that people sang, and not people listening to me sing, and he just told me, write these songs, he started giving them to me. And there were songs that allowed people to sing with me.

8:12Corporate worship. Sing. And you have to sing in the style that you know. I'm urban. That's the style you're going to sing in. I'm going to sing in that kind of style. People are going to know, I don't know why I like the song. Well, it probably sounds like this group over here and that group. And this is what you hear every day. He will come through No weapon

8:42And for one of your songs, for many of us, No Weapon is, yeah, scripturally based. Isaiah 54, 17. What was going through your life at that time to make you pen such a song that for many of us, we still sing, especially when we're going through tough times? I didn't start out to start any genre. Like when we did Commission, I didn't say we're going to do this. It's going to change the game. We just did what we did. You know, wore what we wore, sang what we sang. Same thing with this. I didn't start out to be what they call the architect of praise and worship. I just took praise and worship and I brought it over to the urban side.

9:19Now, my Caucasian friends and family, they have been doing praise and worship for 20, 30 years. Right. But our culture was singing from our experience. So that's why songs with Jesus will work it out. I'll turn it over to him. the baby, need a pair of shoes, even got a light bill, dude. But I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do. We're singing from our experience. We say, I must tell Jesus all of my struggles. Jesus can help me. Jesus alone. Well, then praise and worship just reverse that. I'm going to tell my troubles about Jesus. He already know what I got. So as I started singing, I came up with this thing where it was called a flow.

9:56I got into this thing where if I heard the message, I can take immediately a song and make it to the message. So the preacher was preaching and one of the guys was playing on the organ and he was, you know, playing this little thing. And the preacher was preaching. He went to this one woman and said, I am, the Lord said, I am restoring what the canker worm and the moth have eaten and what the thief has stolen. You're not, he just went on, your lot of years will be there. And she's shouting and the audience is shouting. And then he looked to me. Like, take it away. What you got? Right. And right out of that, no, I'm formed against me.

10:32I'm like, okay, you keep coming, Lord, shall prosper. What I'm going to do here. Now, how can I make it? It won't work. It was just that simple. No way. And then the next thing was, God will do what he said he would do. He's not a man. He should lie. He will just keep repeating that. And we sang that for a year. And when we did it, it would go into 30 to 45 more minutes of extended church, you know, of worship.

11:07Yeah, wow. What an incredible story. What's your testimony, though? You grew up in church, and I guess I've heard the music side of things, but how did the Lord grab your heart? How did you put your faith and trust in Jesus? It was, you know, my father died when I was eight, Ray Hammond, And I didn't know that he adopted me. I remember the proceeding, but I just always thought he was my dad. But truly enough, you know, my mother and real father had an affair. It was a pastor and her. They had an affair. And I was born out of wedlock. And this guy, Raymond Hammond, took my mother and myself on.

11:44And he gave me his name. And he didn't really go to church. And when he died, my mother walked away from God. she said, I'm 32. Nobody else in his family, and he has a big family, nobody else on our block, nobody else's husband died, but you let mine die. And he was only 32. She said, I'm good on you. And she walked away from God for about two years, you know, and we didn't go to church. We just played, you know, she, she wasn't a horrible person. She didn't go out carousing and drinking and smoking and, you know, but she just didn't like God anymore. Then one day, about two years later, we were coming home.

12:30I was coming home probably from Little League football practice. And she said, we're going to start going back to church. You are coming up on the age of accountability, which is 12, you know, and you need to know the Lord for yourself. And we are not upset with God anymore. And so now that was her witness. And I'm sitting there in the car, just listening. She said, I would take you tonight to see at church. I just can't. This movie called The Rapture. And I said, what is that? She says, The Second Coming. And I said, oh, I like that movie. She said, no, you haven't seen this one. And she started saying, one day God is going to come back.

13:10The world's going to come back. He's going to crack the sky. and, you know, X, Y, Z and X, Y, Z. And those that know him and love him will be changed in a twinkle of eye. But those that don't, they're going to be left here and it's going to be, you know, she really explained it to me the way I can understand it. And now I'm paralyzed. I just heard a horror story and I can still feel it. I couldn't talk. I just stood there. She said, well, I have to go away, but we're going to start going back to church. We're not going to listen to, you know, soul music which was r &b music on sundays you know all the way up to five o 'clock she was giving me some new rules and i said okay and i went in the house like i saw the worst scary movie i ever saw wow and we had a rule my mother had a rule do not go in my room for nothing and when she was there we had to stand at the door and say you know ma and she said oh it come you know it was sacred so I was so pricked to my heart because earlier that day I was just a kid in the hood and I went to the safest place in the house which was her bedroom and I kneeled down by her bed and tears as soon as I hit the floor I don't know anything about this Jesus she talking about I hit the floor and immediately I am bawling and I'm like 10 11 years old.

14:40Young, yeah. And I'm bawling crazy. And I'm like, Lord, today, I'm sorry I hurt you. I'm sorry that I crucified your hands. And I saw, because I knew that part. I said, I didn't mean to do that. And today, I cussed a whole lot. I'm sorry. I'm crying and I'm telling him everything. Please forgive me. Help me. Help me. Next thing I know, my knees are hurting really bad. and I must have fell asleep a long time. And I heard her say, Frederick. And I woke up, oh my God. And I walked up to her preparing for impact because the rule in the house, my mother didn't play. She would slap you upside your head just before child protective service.

15:28And she looked at me, she said, what are you doing? but she must have stood there and saw me on my knees yeah because she said go to bed and that's where the journey for god started yeah God will do what he said he will do. He will stand by his way.

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16:56Be smart. Get wise. Download the Wise app today. T's and C's apply. You're listening to the documentary on the BBC Wall Service with me, Swazi Shiri, and I'm joined by special guest and gospel artist Fred Hammond. Wow, this is what is so incredible. It's one thing to know the music, but another to know the stories and the life of the person behind it all. Hearing Fred say he was born out of wedlock seems like an old-fashioned label, but something he seems to have carried with him. Unmarried mothers in the early 1960s were frowned upon by society and Fred has previously shared that just before his mum died, she revealed she tried to have an abortion and was sorry.

17:42Despite going ahead with the procedure, it didn't work. Fred sees the fact he survived as a moment of God's hand of protection and providence over his life. He's also been open about other painful moments he's gone through publicly, from his divorce and the impact that has had on his family, to his physical suffering with multiple knee operations and a fall from stage just two years ago. When I saw him perform in London recently, he was on crutches and shared with the crowd about how his music has helped him overcome the dark periods in his life. I asked Fred if, like his mum, there had ever been a time when his faith may have wavered and if he'd ever felt like walking away because of his suffering.

18:26Now, the only way I dealt with that kind of stuff is what people don't understand is there's a certain part of your life that you're going to have to deal with. You're going to have to deal with certain parts of your flesh and your life. And it is all a part of the process. And a lot of people walk away because they give up because they don't feel like they can make it. And I felt like I couldn't make it all the way through. I was dealing with so many different things, you know, trying to go through and you're just going through life pressures, flesh pressures. But I never wanted to walk away from it, ever did I want to walk away from for no reason.

19:04I was embarrassed. I was guilty. I walked in shame. But my thing was, the good man falls, he gets back up. And that's what I did. But I never was leaving. You know, I was holding on to him like, yeah, I'm not leaving here till you bless me. So I went through my life and all of the struggles of life so that now at this age, I could tell people, I've been there. I understand what you feel. Don't give up. Don't give up. Somebody blessed me with that. When I told them, and this is how I'm feeling. And if I were to give up, it was because I felt like I was so unworthy. Like, I'm just going to stop embarrassing you.

19:48I'm tired. I don't want to embarrass you. But at the end of the day, it was for me to get here so I could tell other people and never stand on this perch of perfect. Oh, I didn't. You all need to get yourself together. You're going to hell. I'm not like those people that preach that. I don't have to preach hell. Hell exists. It's in the Bible. You have a Bible and I have a Bible. So what my job is, is to uplift and inspire. And hopefully your pastor won plants and won waters. Yeah. And God gives an increase. So my job is to not condemn you, but to love you. But I'm not going to coddle you and say it's okay to go be in sin.

20:31I'm just going to tell you I understand. But keep pushing, keep trying, keep walking. That's my job with music and how I inspire people.

20:49well we saw you do that on your tiny desk we was very happy mr fred hammond how did that come about and what was that response like so many of us walking with your music to see you on tiny desk that must have been a real moment for you it was you know it's funny because the a year before that you know, artists, every artist, don't let them fool you. Nobody wants to do small stuff. Every artist that comes up does not see themselves in a little room or a little church. We all see ourselves on a big stage in front of thousands of people sharing our gift and sharing the Lord, no matter how anointed we are.

21:31That is where we thought. And a year before that, I've been in Africa in front of 300 and a half a million people. Me, Kirk, Frankie, Yolanda, Adams, Clark Sisters, Marvin Sapp, and Keir Sheard did an arena tour just a year before that. And I thought, who would ever thought, after wanting to be on them big stages, that we want to get to the smallest stage, which is a tiny desk, that we would treat that as big as honor as every the platform is bigger than as big as anything else and um it was an honor to do it uh it's a culture this is our culture it's our music culture and um and they let me do my thing they say you know you got 18 minutes pick the song you want and let's go this another and it was hard to do because tiny desk audio wise you know we're used to in-ears so we can stay in pitch.

22:28We're used to being able to hear through the microphone and hear it in the room. None of that. Really? Wow. The background singers only had two mics, and we have no monitors. There's no monitors. It looks small, yeah. It is beautiful, but we depend on hearing so we can stay in tune as best we can. And the band had to play really, really soft. and it was this. And so it was a different experience. So we just had to trust it. And we had a absolute ball. It was great. And I call that stuff the grace of God. I'm not supposed to be here. I'm illegitimate. And my mother had an abortion and it didn't work.

23:16So when I look at this and I see people doing no weapon and the kids dancing this, it's grace. I say, I'm not supposed to even be here. So I cannot glory in any of this. It's the grace of God that he said, watch, look what I did with you. Everybody counted you and your mama out. When she did, they threw her away. They took her up to Detroit and they threw her in an attic and nobody wanted to be bothered with you or her but look what I told you I take that message and I make it I make the mess out of a message yeah yeah look at that what does that say about God's grace over your life and his providence the message I sing about yeah and that's the beauty is because my message is not doctrine heavy or organizational heavy it's just glorifying God a lot of people that may not know God.

24:09I know guys that told me, man, I was smoking a blunt, singing glory to glory to glory. And I was just, I was high, but I was singing that song. So that's my job is to give you some phonics so that in the middle, it just, it just creeps into your atmosphere. You know, I had a guy walk up to me and he was, he was in prison and he was like, man, you, you guys are doing a great work. Well, we would sing testimony service to your song. We put it on and sing testimony. And he said, and don't you let no bleep bleep and all these little bleep bleeps out there. Don't you let them know because you're praising God.

24:45Man, you're getting us saved. And I was like, yeah, man. That's it. I get it. I get it. Amen. And people around me were saying, oh, man, don't say that. I said, let that man alone. This is what he knows. God knows. God heard cussing before. Come on, man. Get that word out. Glory to glory. Somebody say glory. Glory to glory. Glory! Say glory! Glory! When Fred did his Tiny Desk concert, people in the comments pointed out that they had spotted his daughter, Brianne, singing with him, which was a huge moment as they spent time apart since Fred's divorce. Just three years ago, Brianne appeared on a show in the US called Grown and Gospel that followed her story and her relationship with her famous father.

25:31I asked him what's it been like to reconcile with his daughter more recently. It's been great. You know, she lives with me still. We're still doing what we do. That's amazing. You have to let your kids be them at a certain point. And they have to make their mind up. And you have to put yourself in a position. Once they're out of your care, you know, you have to trust that, you know, train up a child in the way that they're bent. And when they're older, you know, they will not depart. It don't mean train them to go to Sunday school. They're going to always go to Sunday school. No. It just means that the Lord will always be with him with every decision.

26:09And one of the things I used during that time was the prodigal son, father, gave him what he asked. And the father was sad. We know that the father was sad.

26:25But at some point in time, his son had to come to himself. and after a while all I would do is say when she went on that Grown in Gospel program I never really commented I never commented I said one time I'm on the shelf where you put me and if you ever need me just remember the shelf and I'll be there and I had to go through it and people were saying this I just sat there until one day, everything I said rung in her ears. Everybody that was supposed to be for her turned against her. And she could only do is just come on the dad. My son, Darius, he said, you have a whole house and a whole dad.