BIOGRAPHY
Singer-songwriter Christy Sutherland took a leap of faith five years ago, and faith can move mountains.
With little financial backing and no national distribution, she launched her Christian-music career with a pair of independently created mini-albums. Although she was a complete unknown in the gospel world, Christy achieved swift and surprising success. In 2009, the Christian Music Hall of Fame presented its Visionary Award for Southern Gospel Female Vocalist of the Year to her in Texas. In 2010, she won the prestigious Diamond Award for Christian Country Female Vocalist of the Year in Missouri. The honors are especially meaningful to Christy because they are both fan voted.
During the past five years, she has appeared on The 700 Club and Hour of Power national television shows, been the subject of two feature articles in The Singing News and sung at Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral Christmas and Easter services in California, at the late Rev. Jerry Falwell’s famed Thomas Road Baptist Church in Virginia and at Liberty University’s 9,000-student convocation.
She has taped her first Gaither Homecoming video and has appeared several times on Bill Mack’s nationally heard satellite radio show on Sirius/XM’s “Willie’s Place” channel. She has gradually worked her way up to being featured at major music festivals and billed alongside such established stars as Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, Karen Peck & New River, Brian Free & Assurance, Gold City, Jason Crabb and Guy Penrod. She sang at the Southern Gospel Hall of Fame awards in 2009. For the past three years, Christy has starred on the Louise Mandrell Christmas extravaganzas in Nashville.
Major artists such as Sandi Patty, Rizen, The Greenes and Kim Hopper have recorded her Christian compositions. Prelude issued her song “You Call Me Yours” as a single. The Triumphant Quartet scored a top-5 hit with her song “Somebody Died for Me.” Christy’s “God Is in the Place” was published in a popular Word Music worship choral. “Cry in the Dark” was picked up by Lifeway for its Christmas musical. During the past four years, more than 40 recordings have been done of Christy Sutherland’s songs.
Now her two mini albums have been combined into the full-length CD Christy Sutherland. And after five years of “going it alone,” she has been picked up for national distribution.
“It has all been like a miracle,” says Christy. “I don’t know why all these doors are opening. I believe it’s because this is what God wanted me to be doing.”
Her deep and abiding faith has sustained Christy Sutherland all her life, so her destiny in Christian music should have been obvious. After all, her first public performance was in church. She learned to play guitar at church. She spent her teen years singing in churches. She won a national Christian-music talent contest. She appeared on Christian radio and TV shows.
“I’ve sung in churches my whole life,” she reflects. “All of this groundwork had been laid, but I didn’t want to act on it. Gospel music always came so easily for me. I’d always been doing it. But all I could think of was how much I wanted a career in country music.”
Christy has spent more than a decade in Nashville. During that time, she garnered two major-label recording contracts, a staff writing position for one of the biggest publishing companies on Music Row and multiple appearances on the Grand Ole Opry.
Christy has always been candid about her Christianity. While working in the country industry, she read her Bible and prayed every day. And when she finally began putting Scripture in her songs, she found a whole new life. This occurred at the exact time her country-music career imploded.
“It was January 2005,” she recalls. “After writing for the same publishing company for 10 years on Music Row, they let me go. Three days later, I found out I’d been dropped by the record label. The next Saturday night I was scheduled to play the Grand Ole Opry.
“So I cried on Friday, and I just had to really pray. I said, ‘God, you know I can’t get up there with swollen eyes and a bad voice. I have to just really knock it out of the park.’ I asked Him to be there with me. Ironically, that was the one time I chose to do a gospel song on the Opry. It was ‘Angel Band.’
“At the second show, I could just feel the Holy Spirit there. When I came off the stage, my producer Matraca Berg had tears in her eyes. She said, ‘God is here.’ It was amazing. I said, ‘I asked Him to be here. There was no way I could ever have sung otherwise.’ I was feeling like, ‘The dream is over. It is really over.’
“That very next day, I was in Sunday school with a group of women who are much older than me. They love all the old gospel songs that I love, and they’ve always prayed for me. I told them what had happened. I was just a mess. It was finally OK to fall apart, because I had gotten through that horrible week. I was just sitting there sobbing.
“This little 7-year-old boy who’d come with his mother walks down the aisle with a message and hands it to me. You may think I’m wacko, but I know it was a message from God. It basically said, ‘Do not be afraid. I am with you.’ I knew in that moment, ‘God has a plan. It’s OK.’ He knew everything that was going to happen to me.
“Since there was no career left, I was forced to end my contract with my manager that next Monday. Since I was no longer getting money from the publishing company or the record label, I couldn’t afford my apartment anymore. I moved in with a couple of girlfriends from church. I was at rock bottom, living out of a bedroom. I took a job at the cosmetics’ counter at a Nashville department store. I would hide in shame whenever somebody from the music business would come in.
“Jaime Dudney worked at that same store. She had been on As the World Turns, but had left the show. We became fast friends. She started telling me about her brother, Matt. I’d known him in college, and I remembered him. On June 12, 2005, he came into the store. I had told Matraca, ‘God is bringing me my husband this year.’ She said, ‘Are you serious?’ I said, ‘Yeah, you watch.’ But what I didn’t know was that he was coming into the department store where I was selling lipstick. He asked me out. By our second phone call, we knew we were going to be married.”
Christy Sutherland and Matt Dudney were wed on July 14, 2006. Matt and Jaime are the children of Ken Dudney and Barbara Mandrell. Country superstar Barbara won both of her Grammy Awards for gospel recordings, and she has become a huge booster of Christy’s music, as well as a mentor. Matt gave up his 17-year career as a top chef to manage, book and accompany Christy as she went on her leap of faith.
“Matt has Scriptures taped up all over our kitchen. Anytime I say anything negative, he comes back with the word of God, like, ‘If God is for you, who can be against you?’ It’s just exactly what I need, encouragement.”
Her rejection by Music Row was all the harder to take because she’d always been so loved and supported as a child. Christy was a “miracle baby” who survived, despite weighing just two pounds at birth. She was raised in Port Lavaca, Texas, on the Gulf Coast about midway between Houston and Corpus Christi. She was only five when she first took the stage as a singer.
“I was the only kid who knew the second verse of ‘Away in a Manger,’ so they let me sing it in the church Christmas pageant. I don’t remember it, but my mother says I lifted up my little hands at the end of the song.”
When she was 12, Christy’s church youth leader taught her a few chords on the guitar. She learned to finger pick by listening to albums by the country-gospel family group The Whites. She was fascinated by the country records of Emmylou Harris, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson and Patsy Cline, but was also influenced by such contemporary-Christian stars as Janet Paschal and John Starnes.
“I remember coming home from a voice lesson, and my momma put in a Dottie Rambo cassette to play in the car. Tears poured down my face. I learned a ton of stuff from her. They were straight-from-the-heart songs.
“As a kid, I played as many churches as honky-tonks. I was in a country band, and we’d play Saturday nights. I was 17, and I can still hear Momma. She said, ‘The only way I’m going to let you stay out all hours is if you are in church and in that choir every Sunday morning.’”
Christy and her mother formed a gospel-singing duo. During Christy’s teen years, they performed in churches throughout Southeast Texas. Even after enrolling at Nashville’s Belmont University aiming for a country career, Christy repeatedly returned to her gospel roots. She sang on the Grand Ole Gospel radio show and performed in churches with classmate Allan Hall, who went on to form the acclaimed Christian group Selah. In the summers of 1992 and 1993, Christy was a regular on the Victoria, Texas gospel TV show Crossroads Alive. At age 19 she sang at Lakewood Church, the Houston mega-congregation that is the largest in America. In 1993, she won the Female Vocalist prize on the 700 Club’s National New Artist Search. She also found time to do mission work as an English tutor in Poland and the Ukraine.
Two years after her college graduation, Christy Sutherland got the country recording contract she’d always wanted. Everything seemed to be going her way. She made the country charts with a 2004 single called “Freedom.” Then the sky fell. The child star who always seemed to walk on paved gold was knocked to her knees.
“I had everything taken away from me in three days. If I didn’t have my faith, I know I would have gone back home. In Nashville, Christ Church has been my spiritual home and my rock for years. Most of my gospel songs have been written with Regi Stone, who is my worship leader there. We are like writing soul mates.
“I still read my Bible every morning and pray the way I always did. I believe that all of these things happened to me for a reason and made me stronger. It was all training for what lies ahead. One of my favorite scriptures is Romans 8:28, ‘And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.’
“The very best thing about my new life occurs at the end of my concerts when we give an altar call. We invite people to give their hearts to Christ, and it’s just amazing to see them come down in front and give themselves to the Lord. It is just so great to see people’s lives change.”
By Robert K. Oermann |
