I Stepped Out: Talking with Dorothy Norwood

Revisiting my 2007 radio interview with this nine-time Grammy nominee whose career as a singer/songwriter/producer consistently emphasized empowering and collaborating with women.

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Music is like a map. I started seeing it this way when I was a teenager, possibly when I read Mark Bego’s biography of Aretha Franklin in 1989. It introduced me to Clara Ward, Dinah Washington and the litany of artists that the Queen of Soul absorbed in her youth. Delving into those artists and their own influences broadened my world and made me think differently about what was then contemporary music and where it came from.

Just a short time later, I heard Arvis Strickling-Jones’ 1990 Secret Records release, From The Inside Out, which featured Dorothy Norwood. I was an instant fan of both Strickling-Jones and Norwood, but began the intensive work of discovering Dorothy’s catalog which dated back to the mid/late 50s with Albertina Walker’s Caravans. Just after From The Inside Out, Norwood released her blockbuster Live with the Northern California Gospel Music Workshop of America Choir which contained her massive hit “Victory is Mine,” which sparked an incredible resurgence in her career.

In 2007, I had the opportunity to interview Ms. Norwood—a nine time Grammy nominee—as her No Request album, a collaboration with the Mississippi Mass Choir, was about to be released. The album was a power-packed collection of new songs from her own pen—including “I Stepped Out,” a tune she first wrote and recorded in 1970, then again in 1981, and, again, in 1994. The version on No Request, however, would be the one that became the radio hit. That commitment to a song’s potential speaks to her vision as a producer.

We talked about that role, and her significance as one of the few women in gospel to have production credits dating back, formally, to 1976. She swiftly noted, however, that she had actually been producing since the very beginning of her career at Savoy, just without receiving credit.

At the time of our interview, she was on the heels of promoting the Grammy-nominated Caravans reunion album, Paved The Way, which she spear-headed and co-produced. Norwood’s first recorded solo with the Caravans, “Come On Jesus,” was released in 1957 (session logs indicate it was recorded in 1956 during James Cleveland’s tenure with the group) and mark the beginning of her fifty-four year collaboration with Albertina Walker. We discussed The Caravans reunion and the importance of the preservation of the traditional gospel sound.

When Dorothy began The Dorothy Norwood Singers in the early 1960s, she found immediate success with “The Denied Mother,” a song that quickly earned her the moniker of The Storyteller. The Norwood Singers’ albums fused her stories with congregational songs, hymns and new compositions and, much like James Cleveland, also ventured into collaborations with choirs. One of the singers who came through the Norwood Singers and cultivated a successful solo career was Lois Snead who I interviewed in 2020. Lois shared memories of her days with the Norwood Singers with me.

I recently saw an interview with Norwood where she was asked if she ever considered walking away from gospel. Today, she says no, but there was a period where she did and, of course, I wish I’d known about this moment in her career when I interviewed her in 2007. In 1973, Norwood signed a recording agreement with General Recording Corporation (GRC Records) and recorded a handful of “crossover” tunes (including the sizzling “Get Aboard The Soul Train”) that are rarely discussed. The most successful of the tunes was “There’s Got To Be Rain In Your Life” (which borrows heavily from Dave Crawford’s composition “Sometimes It’s Got To Rain In Your Life”), which charted on Billboard’s R&B chart and was later covered by The Staple Singers. Norwood told JET at the time, “I’ll never turn back completely to gospel. I’ve found that it takes money to live and in gospel you just don’t make any money. In some of my engagements, we didn’t even make enough to meet my expenses.”¹

Billboard, March 9, 1974

She did indeed return to the gospel field with 1976’s At Her Best—the first album in her career she was credited as producer. Her two Jewel releases attempted a contemporary gospel style that translated as less heartfelt than her prior gospel or R&B output, seeming more like awkward attempts to change with the times, but it was her singular album with Dave Crawford’s LA Records that helped her find her footing again. That album, simply titled Live, paired her with the Drinkard Ensemble in New Jersey and captured the fire that had made her Savoy albums in the sixties such hot commodities.

(Audio below of “Beams of Heaven” from that project)

From that point on, Norwood was decidedly traditional in her approach. She’d found her niche and each album throughout the eighties more closely honed in on and perfected her sound. Even when she tackled contemporary mainstream material like Jennifer Warnes’ and Joe Cocker’s “Up Where We Belong” or contemporary Christian tunes like Reba Rambo’s “Lift Him Up,” (erroneously credited to Isaac Douglas) she made them especially churchy.

Recorded without the promise of a deal, she financed 1990’s Live with the Northern California Gospel Music Workshop of America Mass Choir herself. She told Dr. Bobby Jones, “I got the best musicians and one of the best choirs—because I knew, with all my experience, that you can’t do anything on a low budget and expect it to compete with what’s out there. We used Rev. James Cleveland’s musicians.”² She took the finished product to Malaco Records and began a partnership with them that would continue for twenty years. I asked Dorothy about her tenacity and how it has informed her career.

Since the nineties, Dorothy has produced a variety of choirs and soloists, scoring hits for Albertina Walker and Cassietta George, two of The Caravans. She produced Cassietta’s 1994 live recording for Paula Records and we spent some time talking about Cassietta’s talent and her memories of making that album.

In her almost-seventy year career, Dorothy has used her platform to lift up the talents of and collaborate with other women—something else we touched on in our conversation.

Malaco Records has digitally re-released the entirety of her work with the Savoy label, so I urge you to stream those albums and revisit this pioneer’s amazing work! Her latest release, An Incredible Journey, was released in 2014 and featured collaborations with Dorinda Clark-Cole, Vashawn Mitchell, Melvin Williams and Patrick Lundy’s Ministers of Music.

1. “Dorothy Norwood: I’ll Never Return To Gospel,” JET, April 24, 1974, pg. 57.

2. Jones, Bobby, Touched by God: Black Gospel Greats Share Their Stories of Finding God, New York: Simon & Schuster, pg. 263.