Amy Grant

With a warm voice and genuine demeanor, Amy Grant is a towering figure in contemporary Christian music, having been the first dedicated practitioner to successfully cross over into the pop mainstream. When Grant came along as a teenager in the mid-'70s, "inspirational" music was but a small subgenre. By 1985, when she released her seventh album, the Grammy-winning Unguarded, her first album to be marketed to a secular as well as a Christian audience, gospel music constituted a higher percentage of U.S. record sales than jazz or classical, and Grant became first faith-based mus...