c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Not too many singers can claim that Tammy Faye Bakker launched their careers, but count BeBe and CeCe Winans among them.

“That’s funny, but it’s so true,” said CeCe Winans, speaking by telephone from her Nashville home.

CeCe and her brother BeBe got a gig as teenagers with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s PTL Club Singers in the early 1980s. Their big break came when Tammy Faye asked them to sing a duet on the song “Up Where We Belong,” popularized by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes on the soundtrack for the movie “An Officer and a Gentleman.”

Tammy Faye suggested changing the lyric from “Love lifts us up where we belong” to “God lifts us up where we belong.”

The Bakkers loved it. “They kept asking us to sing that over and over,” Winans said. “The rest is history.”

PTL released an album featuring BeBe and CeCe Winans and they soon had record deals with Sparrow and Capitol Records.

While the PTL televangelism empire crumbled after multiple scandals, the Winans siblings soared. CeCe Winans, now with five Grammy Awards to her credit, remains grateful to the Bakkers for launching her career.

“They were two great people who made great mistakes,” Winans said. “We all make mistakes. They made theirs on television. PTL was an incredible place.”

Coming from a musical family of seven boys and three girls, CeCe Winans was destined to sing.

Her parents met in a gospel chorale as teenagers.

“My mom and dad are musical,” said Winans. “They both sing and play the piano. We’ve been singing since we’ve been born.”

CeCe was the first daughter after seven straight boys. Four of her older brothers sang as a group and were the first Winanses to make a gospel music record, in the late 1970s.

BeBe, now 42, the last of the seven Winans sons, went on to do his own solo records, as has CeCe, two years younger.

“BeBe and I never meant to be a duet,” Winans said. But the national TV exposure on PTL prompted requests from churches all over the country for the brother-sister singers.

“I didn’t realize how powerful TV was,” she said. “It opened up doors everywhere. We went overseas, a lot of different places, because of PTL.”

They were also breaking racial boundaries as black singers appearing in all-white evangelical Christian churches.

“We never sang in white churches before,” she said. “It allowed us to tear down a lot of barriers and doors between black and white. It gave us the experience of being able to sing in front of everybody. We were able to create music that a lot of people appreciate.”

Last year, Winans suffered a serious infection that left her hospitalized for seven days and forced the cancellation of any appearances after July.

“I spent the rest of the year taking it easy,” she said. That delayed the current tour to promote her new CD, “Throne Room,” which has a meditative feel, she said.

“It’s created to make people to slow down and encourage them to pray,” Winans said. “It’s to usher you into the throne room, to focus on God and how great he is.”

Winans has done some acting, with guest roles on the WB Network’s “7th Heaven” and PAX Television’s “Doc.” She plans to do more motivational speaking beginning with a series of conferences for teenage and pre-teen girls, to be launched in Nashville this fall.

Winans did a popular 1995 duet, “Count on Me,” with Whitney Houston for the “Waiting to Exhale” movie soundtrack. She has worked across the musical spectrum of inspirational, praise and worship, pop, and rhythm and blues styles, but she has never, solo or duet, sung lyrics that conflict with her Christian beliefs, she said.

“We made sure we kept a positive message, nothing that will ever contradict our faith,” Winans said. “It’s a blessing we’ve been able to accomplish what we’ve accomplished without compromise. That’s been a great ride.”

(Greg Garrison covers religion for The Birmingham (Ala.) News)

MO/RB END RNS

Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for photos of BeBe and CeCe Winans.