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46th Annual GMA Dove Awards - Arrivals

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Earnest Pugh  is an American singer-songwriter of gospel music with a five-octave vocal range Public recognition for the artist commenced with the success of Rain on Us (2009) and I Need Your Glory (2011), and he subsequently attained the title of “Gospel Music’s Leading Man”. Pugh is also the founder of the record label, EPM Music.

After seeking recording contracts from major gospel record labels and being rejected, Pugh decided to launch his own label in 2006. His first album, Earnest Pugh Live: A Worshipper’s Perspective, was released via a distribution agreement with Detroit’s Crystal Rose Records label. The radio single Wrapped Up, Tied Up, Tangled Up rose to the Top 40 on the now defunct Radio & Records gospel radio chart and lay the foundation for his career. He followed up the next year with a CD entitled, Seasons Change, that failed to chart.

In 2007, his album, A Worshiper’s Perspective, won Best Gospel Album at the 6th Annual Independent Music Awards.

A chance meeting with Blacksmoke Worldwide Gospel Records founder, Kerry Douglas, whom had taken James Fortune & FIYA and Keith Wonder Boy Johnson to the top of the gospel charts, would be pivotal to Pugh’s evolution as a national artist. “He [Douglas] told me back in 2008 that he could take my single Rain on Us to number one and he did just that in less than eight weeks,” Pugh told the Miami Times.[4]

The dramatic ballad spent two weeks at #1 on Billboard’s Hot Gospel Songs chart in 2009. The CD, Live: Rain on Us, also featured the Top-40 gospel radio hits Perfect Peace and The Great I Am.

In the early summer of 2011, Pugh delivered another CD titled Earnestly Yours.[5] Douglas had Pugh re-record James Fortune’s track, I Need Your Glory. The song shot to the Top Ten in a few weeks and stayed on the Billboard Hot Gospel Songs chart for ten weeks.[6] The song and the CD earned Pugh extensive media coverage. “Pugh is a pointed and slick singer (and dresser), and for most of this strong album he provides a solid center while his backup choir sings in hushed and reverent tones”, Jon Carmanica wrote in The New York Times.[7]

In January 2012, Pugh announced that his EPM Music label had formed a distribution agreement with eEntertainment One Distribution and would soon be signing a variety of high-profile gospel artists to record under his label banner.

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source: wikipedia

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO GOSPEL SINGER EARNEST PUGH  was originally published on praisecleveland.com