Angela Birchett is a recording artist and actress from the Motor City of Detroit. With multiple Broadway performances — The Color Purple, Dreamgirls, Hairspray, Once on This Island, and more — the vocal powerhouse also portrayed singer Jacky Clark Chisholm in the biopic The Clark Sisters: First Ladies of Gospel in 2020. The Lifetime original movie was a hit with fans, receiving more than 11 million viewers in its first week. She joins rolling out to share her experiences from performing as a child to starring in Kirk Franklin’s A Gospel Christmas, which debuted on Lifetime on Dec. 4.
Where did you develop your love of singing?
Probably like most singers from Detroit, we all somehow got started in the church. Detroit has some of the most legendary [and] iconic, not just gospel singers, but pastors, preachers, songwriters, Grammy Award winners. So, [I] definitely got the structure and bones laid for me as a singer [from] performing and being in front of audiences since [I was] a child. I grew up at Greater. I grew up listening to Fred Hammond, he was a member there and we’d get guests all the time, just any given Sunday, you could hear legends, so that’s what I knew. I come from a singing family, so we just kind of started on that track. And it just never ended.
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