CeCe Winans

CeCe Winans (born October 8, 1964, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.) is an American gospel singer known for her rich vocal style and emotional delivery of faith-centered lyrics and for helping popularize contemporary gospel music by blending classic gospel with elements of pop and rhythm and blues (R&B). Winans belongs to one of the foremost families in Christian music. Before forging a solo career in the 1990s, she found stardom with her brother as the duo BeBe & CeCe Winans.

In 2026 Winans won the 18th Grammy Award of her career, which tied her with Aretha Franklin as the third most Grammy-winning woman in history. She has also received more than 30 Dove Awards from the Gospel Music Association and numerous Stellar Gospel Music Awards.

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The Winans family

Winans is one of 10 children (seven boys and three girls) born to David Winans, Sr., and Delores Winans (née Ransom), both of whom had musical backgrounds. After starting a family, David worked various nonmusical jobs, including as a car salesman and barber, and Delores was a typist and medical transcriptionist. The family lived in Detroit, where they were members of the Zion Congregational Church of God in Christ, a Holiness-Pentecostal church that had been founded by David’s grandfather.

Despite growing up in the city of Motown and the country’s R&B capital, CeCe Winans and her siblings were not permitted to listen to secular music—their parents forbade it. Yet the popular styles of the day filtered through. In 2017 Winans told NPR, “We lived down the street from the Four Tops, so we were very aware of all the other music.” The children were encouraged to perform gospel music from an early age. At age eight, Winans sang her first solo, “Fill My Cup, Lord,” at the family’s church.

When she was in elementary school, Winans performed with her brothers Daniel, Michael, and BeBe in a talent show at Detroit’s Mumford High School, which counts as its alumni such gospel stars as Fred Hammond and several of the Clark Sisters. In a 2024 interview with the podcast Do You Want More?!!!??!, BeBe described their youthful act as “the Christian version of Gladys Knight and the Pips.”

Then in 1981 her brothers Marvin, Carvin, Ronald, and Michael—going by the group name the Winans—released the album Introducing the Winans, which was coproduced by gospel legend Andraé Crouch for his label Light Records. Veering from traditional Black gospel, the album combined adult contemporary, soul, and R&B arrangements and vocals for an urban contemporary style that became the stock-in-trade sound of the Winans.

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BeBe & CeCe Winans

When she was 17, CeCe Winans was invited to audition as a singer on The PTL Club, a religious program hosted by televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker that was based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her protective father requested that she bring her brother BeBe with her, and both siblings were hired as singers for the show. Going by the name BeBe & CeCe Winans, in 1984 they released the album Lord Lift Us Up on the PTL record label. Along with original compositions by BeBe and their brother Marvin, the Grammy-nominated album included a soulful gospel adaptation of Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes’s hit “Up Where We Belong,” from the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman.

After leaving The PTL Club and signing with Capitol Records, the duo went on to record five more albums, including BeBe & CeCe Winans (1987; featuring the Grammy-winning track “For Always”), Heaven (1988), Different Lifestyles (1991), First Christmas (1993), and Relationships (1994). All appeared on the Billboard gospel album chart, with Heaven and Different Lifestyles reaching number one. The latter record also topped the R&B/hip-hop chart and won a Grammy for best contemporary R&B gospel album. Musically and vocally, many of the BeBe & CeCe Winans duets resembled secular love songs and power ballads but with faith-oriented lyrics. In 1991 the brother-and-sister team recorded a cover of the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There,” which featured a guest vocal by Mavis Staples and charted on the Billboard Hot 100.

In the mid-1990s BeBe and CeCe Winans embarked on solo careers, although they later reunited in 2009 to record Still, which reached number one on the Billboard gospel albums chart, peaked at number two on the R&B/hip-hop chart, and earned the duo another Grammy Award for best contemporary R&B gospel album. Testifying to how much the iconic pair had been missed, their single “Close to You” spent 10 weeks at the top of the gospel chart. In 2011 BeBe & CeCe Winans received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in 2015 they were inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame.

Solo career

CeCe Winans’s solo career began with the 1995 release of Alone in His Presence, an album of sacred music that blended more traditional styles with lush string arrangements. One of the most successful gospel recordings of the 1990s, it went platinum and earned Winans her first solo Grammy Award for best contemporary R&B gospel album. That year she also collaborated with pop superstar Whitney Houston on “Count on Me,” from the soundtrack to the film Waiting to Exhale; the song reached the top 10 on the Billboard singles chart.

Winans followed up in 1998 with Everlasting Love, which featured the hit singles “Well, Alright” and “Slippin’.” The next year she launched her own record label, Wellspring Gospel (later renamed PureSprings Gospel), and released Alabaster Box, which was another major critical and commercial success.

Winans’s other notable albums include:

• CeCe Winans (2001)
• Throne Room (2003)
• Purified (2005)
• Thy Kingdom Come (2008)
• Let Them Fall in Love (2017)
• Believe for It: A Live Worship Experience (2021)
• More Than This (2024)

With these releases and others, such as the holiday albums His Gift (1998) and Listen! It’s Christmas (1999; recorded with Johnny Mathis and the London Symphony Orchestra), Winans continued to dominate the gospel charts and rack up awards. Despite requests to record secular or more “commercial” music, Winans stayed loyal to her religious roots, as did her siblings. In 1987 Marvin Winans told the Los Angeles Times, “There are always those that say, ‘Boy, if you were an R&B group, you’d sell a million records.’ But that doesn’t sway us and it doesn’t change us, because while we were teenagers in Detroit, we made up our minds that it would be about the Lord, and we’ve kept that vow.” In a 1995 interview with United Press International, CeCe Winans noted that there was a huge audience for spiritual music. She said, “If we had listened to others, we wouldn’t have sold half as much as we did.”

In 2026 she scored another Grammy for the song “Come Jesus Come,” a duet with fellow gospel powerhouse Shirley Caesar. The acknowledgment brought Winans’s total Grammy Awards haul to 18, while the song itself spent an astounding 59 weeks at the top of the gospel chart. Later that year she released The Hymns, an album of classic spiritual songs such as “Amazing Grace.” Showcasing Winans’s intimate, stripped-down vocals complemented by sparse arrangements, the album was inspired by the music that Winans had heard in church as a child and sprang from her idea to record hymns with simple piano accompaniment to share with her large social media following.

Other projects and personal life

In addition to her music career, Winans has cowritten several books, including her memoir, On a Positive Note (1999), and the faith-based works Throne Room: Ushered into the Presence of God (2004), Always Sisters: Becoming the Princess You Were Created to Be (2007), and Believe for It: Passing on Faith to the Next Generation (2022).

Winans married pastor Alvin Love II in 1984. The couple have two children: son Alvin Love III and daughter Ashley. Long based in the Nashville suburbs, in 2012 Winans and her husband founded the nondenominational Nashville Life Church, where they served as pastors until 2021, when their son became lead pastor.