Shirley Caesar

Shirley Caesar (born October 13, 1938, Durham, North Carolina, U.S.) is an American gospel singer and Pentecostal pastor who is often called the “First Lady of Gospel.” She is known for her powerful vocals and for weaving short sermons into her songs. Her recordings have garnered many Grammy Awards and Dove Awards from the Gospel Music Association.

Early life and career

Caesar was the 10th of 13 children born to James (“Big Jim”) Caesar and Hallie (née Martin) Caesar. Her father was a man of many jobs: a tobacco field worker, minister, and gospel quartet singer. Shirley Caesar said he inspired her “passion for music and the desire to achieve.” After James Caesar’s death in 1945, Shirley Caesar, then seven years old, embarked on a career singing in local churches to help support her mother and siblings. She recorded her first songs in 1951 on the Federal label. Soon she began performing as Baby Shirley, nicknamed as such because of her small stature. (At the beginning of her career, Caesar would stand on a box or a table so audiences could see her.)

“From the age of fourteen to eighteen, I was out on my own,” Caesar says in Anthony Heilbut’s book The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (1985). “I used to have to wait in bus terminals all night long, coming from my programs.” Yet, Caesar also teamed up with gospel singer and preacher Leroy Johnson. On the road in the Jim Crow South they were confronted by racism. In 1954, while traveling to a performance in South Carolina with Johnson and several other Black ministers and musicians, Caesar narrowly escaped being beaten by a group of white men who had attacked them. Recounting the harrowing experience in her 1998 memoir, The Lady, the Melody, and the Word: The Inspirational Story of the First Lady of Gospel, Caesar wrote that she was spared by God for a reason. “I will always believe that I escaped because there was a calling upon my life…and that was to go into all the world to proclaim the good news of the gospel, not just in spoken words, but also in melodious lyrics.”

The Caravans

Caesar graduated from high school in 1956 and enrolled in North Carolina State College (now North Carolina State University), where she studied business education. Two years later, however, she left school to sing professionally with the Caravans, a Chicago-based gospel group fronted by Albertina Walker. It was with the Caravans that Caesar developed her distinctive performance style, in which she would step away from the stage to directly interact with the audience and weave short religious messages, or sermonettes, into songs in a vocal delivery sometimes described as “talk-singing.” This innovation contributed to the success of the Caravans’ 1961 single “Hallelujah It’s Done,” which features a sermonette by Caesar. She attracted her own fan base and, although she remained part of the Caravans, began touring without the group. Often taking place at revivals, Caesar’s solo gigs were explicitly religious, combining gospel music with preaching.

Solo success

In 1966 Caesar struck out completely on her own, leaving the Caravans and soon forming the Shirley Caesar Singers. She won her first Grammy Award in 1972, for best soul gospel performance for her rendition of “Put Your Hand in the Hand of the Man from Galilee.” Three years later she had a crossover hit on the R&B and pop charts with “No Charge,” a cover of country singer Melba Montgomery’s 1974 song. Caesar’s 1980 album, Rejoice, earned her the first of many Dove Awards.

At the Grammy Awards ceremony in 1996, Caesar performed a gospel tribute alongside singers Whitney Houston and CeCe Winans. Caesar reached a new audience in 2016 when a remix of her 1988 song “Hold My Mule” went viral, earning her the number one spot on the Billboard Hot Gospel Songs chart, her first time topping the chart. Also in 2016 she released Fill This House, which was nominated for a Grammy for best gospel album. By this time she had earned 28 Grammy nominations.

Church ministry

For much of her career Caesar’s singing has been entwined with ministry, and her preaching is intrinsically musical. In 1970 she founded Shirley Caesar Outreach Ministries in Durham, North Carolina. She also returned to college, earning a B.S. in business administration from Shaw University in 1984.

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Caesar married Bishop Harold Ivory Williams in 1983. The couple served as pastors of Mt. Calvary Word of Faith Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. Williams died in 2014. Caesar remains a pastor at the church.

Honors and other projects

In 2000 Caesar was inducted into the Gospel Music Association’s Gospel Music Hall of Fame. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2016 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy in 2017. Caesar also made occasional appearances in theater and film. Notably she starred in the 1994 Madison Square Garden production of Mama, I Want to Sing, a musical about a gospel singer who aspires to a pop music career against her mother’s wishes. Caesar played herself in the Frankie Lymon biopic Why Do Fools Fall in Love (1998) and the movie The Fighting Temptations (2003) and had cameos in such television series as The Parkers (2003) and Family Time (2017).