Bryan Wilson

“I used to sing to the grass,” Wilson recalls. “I’d be out in the yard playing and pretending that each blade of grass was a member of my audience.” His next door neighbor Carol Parker often over heard him singing and thought that he was good. She sent a tape of him singing “His Eye is on the Sparrow” to Jerry Mannery at Malaco Records. He liked it and featured Wilson’s rendition on a Mississippi Children’s Choir project with the same arrangement that Sheila had taught him. Wilson’s high notes and vocal gymnastics sealed the song’s fate and essentially sold the CD, A New Creation. The album reached #39 on Billboard’s gospel chart and has since sold over 100,000 units. Soon gospel announcers had nicknamed Wilson the “Boy Sparrow.”

Wilson’s instant success led Malaco Records to offer him his own recording deal. Among the heavy-hitter producers crafting Bryan’s debut were gospel legend Walter Hawkins and John P. Kee. Sticking with a dramatic hymn as the radio single, “Blessed Assurance,” took the cd Bryan’s Songs to #21 on Billboard’s gospel chart in 1996. His 1999 “Growing Up” CD was half traditional and half contemporary.  A good, solid album, Malaco Records did not promote the album aggressively as they needed to. The three-year gap between releases necessitated a reintroduction to gospel radio that Bryan did not get.  In the meantime, Wilson suffered through puberty and a voice change that depressed him.

“I can remember times when my voice was changing, I would go places to sing and they would want me to sing `His Eyes on the Sparrow,’ but I just could not hit the notes,” Wilson says. “A lot of the times crowds were very displeased because they wanted to hear the little boy with the high voice.  I went through a period almost where I couldn’t sing, and it was depressing, because I felt like, now God, you blessed me with this voice and you blessed me to do all these things, but now I feel like He was just taking it away from me.  Then, there came a time when I didn’t even want to sing.  I was just real hurt, I felt like my career was just coming to an end. I began to think about Tevin Campbell, whom people had always compared me to  – I wondered if he went through the same thing. I had to re-train my voice and learn how to sing all over again.”