Overview
Hezekiah Walker
A transplant of Brooklyn’s notorious Fort Greene projects, Hezekiah Walker had a good life growing up, thanks to a mother who encouraged his passion for choir-based gospel music in spite of the tumult surrounding him. It was then, when he was barely eight years old, that his love affair with gospel began.
“I remember listening to some of the music my mother was playing and it brought tears to my eyes,” Walker recalls. “I made up my mind from that point on that I was going to sing music that was going to touch people like that. I was the odd man out,” he continues, “there was so much stuff to get into in those projects, but music kept me occupied. I got so involved with it that I wouldn’t let myself get involved with anything else.”
Walker never looked back. By the time he was fourteen, and without any formal musical training, he was already leading a choir of his own at a local congregation and learning the ropes of creating songs and arrangements that strike a chord in hearts of people from all walks of life.
Walker has amassed such a rapport with worshippers and performance ensembles that his rousing, heartfelt compositions have become synonymous with Sunday morning. It’s difficult to have church and not include at least one of his songs in the set list.
“We’re trying to keep choirs alive,” Walker says. “Everyone’s trying to do away with choirs, but you can’t delete choirs. As long as there’s a church, there’s always going to be a choir.”
When not leading his blockbuster ensemble LFC or splitting his time pastoring churches in both New York and Pennsylvania, Walker gets behind a microphone of a different sort – as a radio host on New York’s 1190 WLIB – imparting hope and encouragement to anyone with ears to hear, especially those outside the walls of the church.
Souled Out, Walker’s long-awaited 13th recording, is set to keep alive the choir tradition, a mission the Grammy® and Stellar-winning choirmaster has upheld for over twenty years, even as gospel music itself has shifted to more contemporary expressions of praise.
“In this day and age — with high gas prices, the mortgage crisis, job problems, the economy —a lot of times that can really hold people back from giving themselves to God and to the church,” he says. “We decided that regardless of what we go through, we’re still going to remain souled out.”
