In the summer of 1993 a young unknown gospel musician released-to little initial fanfare-his self-titled debut album, Kirk Franklin & The Family. Accepted and embraced almost immediately by the masses, it went on to spend 100 weeks at the top of Billboard magazine's gospel charts, while also crossing over to the R&B side, and becoming in the process the first gospel album ever to sell over a million units. But despite record-shattering entrance, the world had seen only the foreshadowing of the work of a man who, in less than a decade, would come to stand with the likes of gospel royalty Thomas A. Dorsey, James Cleveland, and Andrae Crouch as one of the pivotal, defining forces of 20th-century-and-beyond gospel music.
In the summer of 1993 a young unknown gospel musician released-to little initial fanfare-his self-titled debut album, Kirk Franklin & The Family. Accepted and embraced almost immediately by the masses, it went on to spend 100 weeks at the top of Billboard magazine's gospel charts, while also crossing over to the R&B side, and becoming in the process the first gospel album ever to sell over a million units. But despite record-shattering entrance, the world had seen only the foreshadowing of the work of a man who, in less than a decade, would come to stand with the likes of gospel royalty Thomas A. Dorsey, James Cleveland, and Andrae Crouch as one of the pivotal, defining forces of 20th-century-and-beyond gospel music.
| 
