The Clark Sisters, Fred Hammond and Deitrick Haddon will headline the first gospel residency on the Las Vegas Strip, opening October 8 and 9 at The Theater at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas. It is the first time the three acts will share a Strip stage together.
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The show is called Legends of Gospel: Vegas Residency, and it comes from IKON Presents in partnership with Dr. Holly Carter, president and chief executive of Relévé Entertainment, who created the show and serves as executive producer. Tickets have been on sale since July 17 at GospelVegas.com. The October weekend is not the whole run. The producers are treating those two nights as the opening chapter of an ongoing concert series, with additional dates and additional artists set to be announced in the months ahead.
That structure is the part worth paying attention to. A Las Vegas residency is not a tour stop. It is a standing engagement where an artist or a show holds a venue on a recurring basis, and it has become one of the most reliable money makers in live music because the audience travels to the act instead of the act traveling to the audience. Country, rock, pop, hip hop and R&B have all built residencies on the Strip. Gospel, a genre that fills arenas across the country every year, has never had one. Neal Carter, a spokesperson for IKON Presents, framed the announcement around exactly that absence, saying gospel has never had a true home on the Strip until now.
How historic the gospel residency is depends on which version of the claim you take. Some of the announcement language describes it as the first ever on the Strip. Show producer Keesha Brickhouse, who heads production for Relévé Entertainment, described it as the first in more than sixty years. Others have called it the first of this era. Nobody involved has publicly identified what the earlier one was, so the safest read is the one the producers themselves keep returning to, which is that nothing on this scale has existed on the Strip in living memory for most people who will buy a ticket.
The opening lineup is stacked with people who built the modern sound of the genre. The Clark Sisters, made up of Jacky Clark Chisholm, Karen Clark Sheard, Dorinda Clark-Cole and Twinkie Clark, are the highest selling female gospel group in history. Their catalog runs from “You Brought the Sunshine” to “Livin’,” and their arrangements shaped how contemporary gospel is sung, phrased and produced. In their statement about the residency, the group called it a blessing to bring the experience to that stage after decades of performing worldwide.Fred Hammond is one of the most decorated artists in the genre, with a long shelf of Stellar Awards, Dove Awards and a Grammy. He came up in Commissioned before building the solo catalog that essentially defined urban praise and worship for a generation of churches. Deitrick Haddon is the youngest of the three headliners and the one who has moved furthest outside the genre’s traditional lane, blending gospel with R&B, hip hop and soul. He first drew attention leading Voices of Unity and has since built a career spanning chart topping albums, television and film. He is a Stellar and Dove Award winner and has been nominated for both a BET Award and a Grammy.
There is a detail in that lineup that has gone mostly unremarked. All three headliners came out of Detroit, a city whose churches produced a disproportionate share of the voices that define gospel music. The first gospel residency on the Strip is, in its opening weekend, a Detroit show.The person who assembled it has been working in this space for two decades. Dr. Holly Carter produced “The Clark Sisters: First Ladies of Gospel,” the Lifetime biopic that became the highest rated original movie in the network’s history, and she produces the annual Stellar Gospel Music Awards. She also created “Preachers of L.A.” for Oxygen, which is where she and Haddon first worked together. Carter has said she carried the idea of bringing gospel to Las Vegas at this scale for years before it came together.
Her partner on the project brings the Vegas side. IKON Presents is a Las Vegas based entertainment and events company that produces live shows, hip hop and R&B concerts, artist showcases and brand activations. The company knows the market and the venues. Carter brings the artists and the relationships. That division of labor is a large part of why this got built when previous attempts did not.
The Theater at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas sits slightly off the main Strip corridor at the property formerly known as the Hard Rock Hotel, and it holds a few thousand people, which makes it substantial without being an arena. For a genre proving out a new format, that is a sensible room to start in.
What happens after October is the open question. If the two opening nights perform, the series expands, more names get added, and gospel gets a permanent address in a city that has never given it one. Additional dates and performers are expected to be revealed in the coming months, and the producers have been clear that the October weekend is meant to be a beginning rather than a one time event.
