Great Is Thy Faithfulness (Carrie Underwood feat. CeCe Winans)

My Savior (2021), Carrie Underwood’s all-hymns record, was a genuine risk for an artist whose commercial identity is built on crossover country-pop – a stripped-back gospel album with no radio single logic behind it. “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” featuring CeCe Winans, is the record’s clearest justification for the swing. Where George Beverly Shea’s original popularization stayed plain by design, Underwood and Winans build toward something closer to a duet showcase: full choir-adjacent backing, a key change that gives both singers room to climb, and a vocal blend pairing Underwood’s powerful, technically precise belt against Winans’ deeper, more gospel-inflected phrasing.

The pairing works because neither singer tries to out-sing the other into a competition. Winans, a genuine gospel-music institution with her own decades of recorded hymns behind her, anchors the lower harmonies and the more understated verses; Underwood takes the lead melody and saves her range for the song’s climactic final chorus, letting the arrangement’s escalation feel earned rather than front-loaded. It’s a bigger, more produced reading than the hymn’s own history necessarily calls for, but the two voices justify the scale – this doesn’t sound like a country star dabbling in gospel technique, it sounds like two artists who both know exactly what the genre requires and split the load evenly.

The Recording Academy agreed: the album won Best Roots Gospel Album at the 2022 Grammys, Underwood’s eighth career win, with this track as one of its clear standouts. That’s not a genre-tourism trophy. It’s a recognition that the reading holds its own against the deepest catalog in American sacred music.

8.5/10 – the hymn scaled up for two of its era’s most technically capable voices, and it earns every bit of the size.

Hero image: “My Savior” single artwork, Capitol Christian Music Group. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.