BY MICHAEL BIRD
Editor’s Note: You can give a listen to this song at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfGDvDGE7zk
In the summer of 1969, an arrangement of a Baptist hymn from 1755 became a Top 40 hit. The story of how it happened is fascinating.
Edwin Hawkins was a church pianist at Ephesian Church of God in Berkeley, California. Berkeley had been ground zero for student protests during the late 1960s, but northern California was also at the forefront of the Jesus movement of that same era that produced a lot of contemporary gospel music.
In preparation for the Northern California State Youth Choir, Hawkins arranged eight hymns for the young people to sing. The youth choir was comprised of people aged 17 to 25, and they needed to raise money for a trip to a church youth conference in Washington, D.C.
The eight tracks were hastily recorded in a church on a basic two-track tape recorder. 500 copies of the record were pressed. One of the copies made its way to KSAN-FM in San Francisco. A popular disc jockey named Abe “Voco” Kesh put “Oh Happy Day” into its regular rotation, and the song became a local hit. Other radio stations followed. Before long, Buddah Records signed the Northern California State Youth Choir – now known as the Edwin Hawkins Singers – to a distribution deal.
With its jazzy groove featuring echoes of Brazilian pop, Hawkins cited Sergio Mendes as an influence on his radical reworking of the hymn.
“I liked how he alternated between major and minor keys and created rhythmic patterns on the keyboard,” he explained. “My piano intro was along those lines.”
The lead singer on the record is Dorothy Morrison, who had been singing in her church choir in Richmond, California, when selected for the Youth Choir.
“The lyrics were simple and they rhymed, but they were a lot to remember,” she said in a later interview. “At the church, I wrote two sections on my palms with a pen. The third section I memorized. During the recording, I put up my hands, with my palms facing me. Everyone thought I was feeling the spirit. I was – but I also was reading the lyrics.”
Morrison later became a backup singer on records for Paul Simon, Boz Scaggs, and Chicago, among others.
The arrangement starts off peaceful and quiet but builds in momentum. The simplified lyrics of the original hymn get boiled down to three lines:
“Oh happy day / when Jesus washed / my sins away.”
The choir is backing up the lead vocalist in a call-and-response style, but then the chorus bursts wide open and all of the voices sing:
“He taught me how to watch, fight and pray / and live rejoicing every day”
Then, the choir calms back down for a minute before singing praises that grow louder and more insistent with each repeat: “Oh happy day!”
The song entered the Hot 100 in May of 1969 and got all the way to #4 that summer. Yes, the summer of ’69, immortalized forever in popular culture as the summer of the “Helter Skelter” Tate-LaBianca murders, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon, and three days of peace and music at Max Yasgur’s farm in Woodstock.
Right there at that moment, “Oh Happy Day,” a song that was 200 years old, was riding the charts, and was even performed twice on the first day of the Woodstock festival by people who had probably never set foot inside of a church.
“Oh Happy Day” won a Grammy in 1970 for Best Soul Performance. It has been featured in dozens of films and television shows in the years since.
Edwin Hawkins could not have known that his use of contemporary sounds like synthesizers, a Latin groove and a R&B lead vocalist would influence later generations of gospel music. But without a doubt, the Good News reached the mainstream when that message was needed most.
Michael Bird has been a music teacher for 26 years, most of that time for Tallassee City Schools in Elmore County. He is also a night manager for Tallassee Super Foods, a columnist for the Tallassee Tribune, and a radio host on 580 WACQ & FM 98.5. Mr. Bird is married to professional musician Sena Thibodeaux Bird and they have seven children ranging in age from 25 to 8.
