Tag: John Darin Rowsey

From age 11 to the Dove Award, John Darin Rowsey’s long road

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AMY TURNER

John Darin Rowsey may not have set out to become one of southern gospel’s most reliable hitmakers. He just wanted to sing, starting at age 11, back before he had any sense of what a career in this business would eventually ask of him.

That early stage time turned into decades of work. He joined New Journey in 1985, spent time with Karen Peck & New River starting in 2000, and in 2012 landed with The Guardians, where he now writes and arranges most of the group’s material. The songs kept climbing the southern gospel charts, the hits kept stacking up, and eventually a Dove Award showed up to confirm what fans already knew. Somewhere along the way, “prolific” stopped feeling like an exaggeration and started feeling like the plain truth.

Ask him about his influences and the names come easily. Dottie Rambo sits at the top of the list, and Rowsey doesn’t hesitate when explaining why: “probably would be at the top of my list because of the different styles and how much emotion she can pack in a lyric.” Bill and Gloria Gaither shaped him too, along with Ronnie Henson. These are the names you’d expect from a southern gospel songwriter of his generation, the kind of lineage that gets name checked in liner notes and interviews alike.

But the deepest influence wasn’t a songwriter at all. It was his pastor, Chuck Lawrence, the man Rowsey calls the one who “took me under his wing and mentored me.” Lawrence wasn’t interested in easy praise. He didn’t pat Rowsey on the head and send him on his way. Instead, as Rowsey remembers it, Lawrence “would not just say, oh, that’s a good kid” and let it go. He pushed back, offered notes, passed along lessons picked up from Nashville, and stuck with the process long enough to actually shape it. “He grew the tree,” Rowsey says, a line that lands with the kind of quiet weight you only get from real gratitude.

That mentorship model, someone taking the time to actually develop a young talent rather than just encourage it, is baked into how Rowsey approaches his own writing now. He’s not just filling southern gospel radio with his own songs; he’s collaborating, including on The Guardians’ current single “I know you,” co-written with Rodney Griffin. It’s another entry in a catalog that just keeps growing, proof that the tree Chuck Lawrence planted decades ago is still very much bearing fruit.

John Darin Rowsey found more than he expected in “Where Healing Happens”

Published on by Texas GospelLeave a comment

AMY TURNER

Some songwriters doesn’t chase the spotlight so much as build the stage for everyone else to stand on. John Darin Rowsey has spent decades doing exactly that, first with New Journey, then Karen Peck & New River, and for the last dozen-plus years as the songwriting engine behind The Guardians, the southern gospel quartet rounded out by Pat Barker, Paul Lancaster and Dale Forbes. Their new project, Where Healing Happens, might be the most personal thing he’s ever put his name on.

Rowsey started singing in front of crowds at 11 years old, an age when most kids are still figuring out how to talk to strangers. That early exposure shaped a career defined less by ego than by service; he’s the guy in the room writing the songs other people get to sing, and he’s made peace with that role in a way that feels almost countercultural in an industry built on hooks and headliners. Hundreds of songs, multiple number-one hits on the southern gospel charts, a Dove Award. The résumé speaks for itself. But ask him about this particular record, and something shifts in his voice.

“You know, it was really a labor of love,” Rowsey says. “I feel like the songs that are on this project speak my heart more so than just about any project I’ve ever been a part of.” He pauses on the why of it, landing somewhere true: “I guess it’s because we all walk through seasons that are difficult. We walk through seasons of joy. Every season is different, and different songs come out of those seasons.” The album, he explains, was built to meet people wherever they are, grief, gratitude, doubt, all of it: “We were able to pick songs on this project that help you walk through every season of your life.”

What catches Rowsey off guard, even now, is what happened once he handed the songs over to his bandmates. Writing them was one thing. Hearing them sung back was another entirely. “The guys took the lyrics and sung them, it was way above my expectations,” he says. “I thought I knew they would do a great job, but I never dreamed that they would interpret the songs the way they did.” There’s real surprise in that admission, the kind that only comes when collaboration outpaces even a songwriter’s own vision for his work. “I think this record means more to me because of that than any I’ve ever been a part of. So I’m really thankful for that.”

That gratitude tracks with everything The Guardians have built their identity around. Three Dove Award nominations, a string of number-one songs, Fan Awards, and still the group’s mantra traces back to John the Baptist in John 3:30: “He must increase but I must decrease.” It’s a strange thing to hear a quartet with this much chart success talk about diminishment as the goal, but that’s the tension that seems to animate the group, ambition in service of something bigger than themselves.

Occasionally they’re joined onstage by founding member Dean Hickman, a man who’s logged more than 60 years in southern gospel music, a living thread back to the genre’s roots standing next to a group actively reshaping what it sounds like now. It’s a lineage thing, the old guard blessing the new, and it fits the arc of a group whose newest record is, by its own songwriter’s account, less a product than a testimony.

Where Healing Happens isn’t trying to be everything to everyone. It’s trying to be honest about the seasons people actually live through. For Rowsey, that honesty is the whole point.