When CeCe Winans, her husband Alvin Love II and their two children moved into their gated community in the Nashville suburb of Brentwood in the mid-’90s, the house rule was the same one she’d grown up with in Detroit, on Motown turf: They listened to gospel, and only gospel. The conviction ran deep: Her singer father David Winans, known as Pop, had often told of how he’d refused to follow his friend Sam Cooke from churches into nightclubs in the 1950s.
“Now, as strict as that was,” says now-52-year-old CeCe, after answering the door of her contemporary mansion with a hug and leading the way into the dining room, “it wasn’t like we were in trouble if they heard that we heard a Stevie Wonder song. … We lived down the street from the Four Tops, so we were very aware of all the other music. But it’s not what was allowed in our home. So we heard it on the radio, or we heard it in school. You weren’t going to dodge that. And all of us being music lovers, we knew good music when we heard it.”
Winans emphasizes that she didn’t experience her parents’ all-gospel edict as deprivation. For every traditional-sounding mass choir or Southern quartet, there were innovators who incorporated current soul, pop and rock flavors into their arrangements and instrumentation.
“People think of gospel as one way, but we found all the different styles of gospel and Christian music and don’t really feel like we missed anything,” she says. “Andraé Crouch, I mean, he was definitely on the same level as any Motown artist,” she says. “When you listened to him, he had all the sounds, contemporary sounds. A lot of people don’t know who Rance Allen is, but if you were to pick up his CDs even now, you’re gonna say, ‘Oh my God.'”
At this point in her career, Winans has accumulated a great deal of perspective on her formative environment and familial ties, on paths taken, on priorities preserved. She’s remained devoted to gospel even though her stylistic adaptability brought her popularity well beyond the gospel world. She even started a nondenominational church with her husband. Her new album, Let Them Fall In Love, weaves together the disparate threads of her experience — in Detroit, in the Winans lineage, in an ever-evolving musical tradition. And it bears the fingerprints of a new generation, thanks to the contributions of her son, Alvin Love III.
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