Helen Baylor

Helen Baylor
Born	January 8, 1953 Tulsa, Oklahoma United States
Origin	Los Angeles, California United States
Genres	Christian
Years active	1990 - present
Labels	Word, Expansion Records(in the uk)

Helen Baylor (born January 8, 1953) is an American gospel singer.

Baylor was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and raised in Los Angeles, where she first performed as a secular nightclub act. She opened for Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, and B.B. King while still in her teens, and performed in the musical Hair. In the 1970s she continued working in musicals and also sang with Captain & Tennille and Chaka Khan, but struggled with drug abuse in the 1980s as her career soured.

Baylor became sober late in the decade, strengthening her Christian faith and deciding to launch a career in gospel music. She released her first gospel effort on Word Records in 1990. Her first five albums all hit the Top Ten of the U.S. Billboard Top Gospel Albums chart, with the most successful being 1994's The Live Experience, which reached #1 on that chart. The track "Oasis" was huge in the UK, via Expansion Records and stayed on the Music Week Dance Chart for 14 weeks. Also, the song "Sold Out" (from the album Start All Over) won a Dove Award for Contemporary Gospel Recorded Song of the Year at the 24th GMA Dove Awards in 1993

In July 2011, Baylor announced that she is co-producing a feature film about her life story. The film, A PRAYING GRANDMOTHER:THE HELEN BAYLOR STORY, will feature accounts that she first shared in the song, "Helen's Testimony" (Word, 1995) and in her autobiography, No Greater Love: The Helen Baylor Story. Baylor approached award-winning filmmaker Cassandra Hollis to co-produce and direct the film.

Discography

• Highly Recommended (Word Records, 1990)
• Look a Little Closer (Word, 1991)
• Start All Over (Word, 1993)
• The Live Experience (Word, 1995)
• Love Brought Me Back (Sony Records, 1996)
• Helen Baylor...Live (Verity Records, 1999)
• My Everything (Diadem Records, 2002)
• Full Circle (MCG, 2006)