Stand is a song, featured on Donnie McClurkin’s self-titled debut album, released in October of 1996. Stand, was the album’s biggest hit, after receiving a critical endorsement from Oprah Winfrey. The popular reception for Stand, keep his debut album in the top ten of Billboard’s Gospel sales chart for over two years, earning Donnie a certified gold record. Stand was composed by Donnie himself, after an emotional break down on a red-eye flight from Los Angeles. The whole song was composed within 20 minutes — the melody and the words. Not having a tape recorder, he taught the song to a choir in Cleveland a few days later, so he could remember it.
Donnie McClurkin in his own words of how the song came together: “Oh, Jesus! I was sitting on a plane. I was traveling from Los Angeles going to Miami and stopping in Detroit, and I had been gone for two weeks and I was going to be gone for a week and a half more and I was just having a meltdown, a real meltdown. I didn’t want to go any further. I wanted to stop, and I sat on the back of a big 260-seat jet, with only 50 people on it, ’cause it was 1 a.m. in the morning, red-eye flight. I was so tired.”
“I was fed up with this; this didn’t make any sense, and my thing to God was, God, why can’t I be normal? Why can’t I have a wife, 2.5 children, a dog, a cat, a white picket fence? Where’s my stuff? Why do I have to do this? And I was really out of it. And within 20 minutes the whole song came. What do you do when you’ve done all you can? Seems like it’s just never enough. What do you say when people who thought that they would be with you, promised that they’d be with you — but they didn’t understand the level of ministry that God was calling you to, and they left because they couldn’t handle it, and you’re all alone?”
“I thought it was a song just for me. You know, artists have their own special songs that nobody else is going to hear and nobody else would understand because it’s totally crazy. I don’t know what happened from there. It just went, like, berserk, crazy, took on a life of its own.”
article courtesy of GospelConnoisseur.com
