David "Pop" Winans was the patriarch of a family of gospel singers whose far-reaching influence has by no means been confined to the world of spiritual music, but has also crossed over into the worlds of pop, R&B and rap. In 1988, four of his seven sons – the twins Carvin and Marvin, along with Ronald and Michael, better known as The Winans – backed up Michael Jackson on his hit "Man in the Mirror".
Mainstream success, however, was not just confined to the quintet. In 1996, CeCe – née Priscilla, his eldest daughter – duetted with Whitney Houston on the uplifting "Count on Me", the Top 20 transatlantic hit from the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack. The following year, when EMI tried to introduce Eternal to the US market, they paired up the British girl group with BeBe (Benjamin) Winans on the gospel-flavoured "I Wanna Be the Only One", a No 1 in the UK and a hit throughout Europe. In 1999, Mario Winans, part of the family through his mother's second marriage to Marvin, was asked by the rapper Puff Daddy to contribute his soulful vocals to the Top 30 single "Best Friend".
Pop managed the Winans throughout the Eighties and early Nineties as the vocal group won six Grammy Awards in the gospel field, had hits in their own right with "Let My People Go", and worked with Anita Baker, Michael McDonald and Stevie Wonder. In 1989, Pop and his wife, Delores, released their own Grammy-nominated album, Mom & Pop Winans, and Pop also received a Grammy nomination for Uncensored, his 1999 solo effort recorded with the Winanaires.
Winans was born David Glenn, to a teenage mother named Laura Glenn, in Detroit in 1934. His father, Carvin Winans, denied paternity, though he relented in 1963, and the family took up the Winans surname. He led a gospel quartet called the Nobelaires and met his future wife in 1949, when both were singing with the Lucille Lemon Gospel Chorus. They married in 1953 and Winans juggled several jobs, as a car salesman, a taxi driver, a barber and a custodian, to provide for his ever-growing family.
Active in the community, in the late Sixties he began to preach at a Pentecostal church in Detroit, and started a youth organisation. While working as a cleaning contractor he roped in his children to help, who would sing as they went. "All the kids developed a strong work ethic. I'd strap BeBe on my back and jump on my motorcycle and go to clean up at McDonalds," he said in 1992. "We were oriented to gospel music, and we taught our children nothing but the way of the Lord. I never let them get involved with any other activity but church."
From the mid-Seventies, he helped to guide the careers of his four sons, who originally called themselves the Testimonial Singers but soon began using the family surname. In the early Eighties, they came to the attention of the legendary gospel singer Andrea Crouch who helped them get a recording contract with Light Records. Bebe and Cece Winans were also successful as a duo and as solo artists, and the Winans Phase II, a group comprising four of Pop's grandsons, also carried the family gospel tradition for a while.
Most of the Winans are still involved in gospel music or with the church. Pop's son, the Reverend Marvin Winans, officiated at the funeral in Detroit and said: "My father was not a man who sought the light. He was very humble. And he would rather push us out there than for us to have him out there. He was our hero long before anyone knew who we were."
David Glenn (David "Pop" Winans), gospel singer and manager: born Detroit 20 April 1934; married 1953 Delores (six sons, and one deceased, three daughters); died Nashville 8 April 2009.
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