Music Notes 6-16-24
Father’s Eyes is the title track of the album My Father’s Eyes, written by Gary Chapman and released in 1979 by 19-year-old Amy Grant. It was her 2nd studio album, released on Myrrh Records, and was a turning point in her career. The title track gave her her 1st Christian Top 10 hit, as well as the Christian Top 10 hit Faith Walkin’ People. The album was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Gospel Performance, Contemporary, and was certified Gold in 1987. I’m always on the lookout for good songs for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and was delighted to find this one.
Total Praise is a powerhouse gospel ballad by Richard Smallwood, who is a legend in gospel music circles. It’s best to let him tell the story: “In October 1995, my mother was ill, my godbrother was terminally ill, and I was a caregiver, going from the hospital to my house, taking care of everything. Caregiving is a very difficult thing to do. It’s time-consuming, and if you don’t watch out, you’ll end up in the hospital, too. I also began to feel that I wasn’t doing enough for my loved ones. I felt helpless and inadequate in what I was doing. At the same time, I had just founded Vision and was starting early rehearsals in preparation for a recording the beginning of that next year, 1996. I was coming up with music for the album, so from time to time, I would sit at the piano and fiddle around and see what I could come up with. I don’t remember specifically trying to write a song that day in October. I just sat down at the piano in my living room and started playing, and Total Praise just started coming out. I remember distinctly recognizing that it was a praise song, in terms of a theme, but I was trying to pull it back the other way and go into a pity party kind of song: “Lord, I will lift mine eyes to the hills, I know you’re my help, so I need you to hold me, to dry my tears”- that kind of thing. But the more I pulled it that way, the more it pulled the other way, in terms of praise.
I thought, “This is a song we probably could use. Let me see if I can’t finish it.” I wrote Total Praise pretty fast - in an hour or an hour and a half. I was putting it down on my cassette recorder, which was sitting on my piano. I could hear the amens in my head, but I wanted to hear them back at me. I had a four-track cassette player on which you could record separate tracks. I recorded the amens on it so I could make sure the harmony was what I was hearing in my head. It took about a half hour to record the amens. But at the rehearsal, we couldn’t move on from the song. After I taught it and we sang it, I remember God coming through and stopping the rehearsal. The same thing happened the following year, in Atlanta, during the sound check the day before the recording. Total Praise was to be the opening song for the recording. I’m not sure why I put it first; it was just a good opening. It was sort of a new chapter for me. I’d done the Smallwood Singers for almost fifteen years, and this was the first time I had done a choral ensemble aggregation. So, I thought it would just sort of set the tone. But it was even hard to move past it the night we recorded it.”
Total Praise has become a “Top 10” standard in the world of gospel music, has been covered by just about everybody, from Patti LaBelle to Destiny’s Child, and was sung on the White House lawn for President Obama and Pope Francis.