With her powerful, honeyed soprano and talent for songwriting and record production, Faith Evans is one of R&B's all-time greats. Mother to Wallace's son, CJ (Evans already had a daughter, Chyna, and later had two more sons, Joshua and Ryder), she was eventually able to move on with her life and channel her heartbreak into her music — notably on her Grammy-winning tribute to her late husband, "I'll Be Missing You," a collaboration with Combs and the band 112. She has released six solo albums in the course of a stellar career, plus a duets album with the Notorious B.I.G, using posthumous recordings of the late rapper, in May 2017.
Early Life
The first time Faith Evans sang in public, she was three years old. She overcame her nerves to belt out "Let the Sunshine In," from the musical Hair, to the congregation of her local place of worship, Emanuel Baptist Church, in Newark. She recalled the moment in her 2008 memoir, Keep the Faith: "After seeing the reaction of my first audience, I knew I would be a singer. I knew I'd found my calling."
Evans had been living in Newark since before her first birthday. She was born in Lakeland, Florida. Her mom, Helene, was 18 years old, "barely out of high school", and living in Dade City, Florida, with her twin sister, Hope, and their younger siblings, Missy and Morgan. Evans' father, Richard Swain, was out of the picture by the time she was born. She has never met him. He is white, hence Evans' light complexion, but as she wrote in Keep the Faith, "I was raised 100 percent Black and have always considered myself a Black woman."
With Helene under pressure from the demands of being a young single mother, two older cousins, Mae and Bob Kennedy, offered to look after Evans. They were a kind-hearted couple that fostered a lot of children, and Evans went to live with them in their bustling house in the Weequahic area of Newark. She often referred to them as her grandparents, rather than have to explain to people her complex family story. The Kennedys did their best to shelter Evans from some of the harsher realities of life in 1970s Newark, which was suffering economically in wake of the 1967 riots. "Unfortunately," Evans wrote, "some of the characters in and out of the house were just as suspicious as the people my grandparents were trying to protect me from on the street."
Evans became obsessed with her mom's record collection on visits to Florida, rifling through albums by Donna Summer, Earth Wind and Fire and Anita Ward. She did the same at her Aunt Hope's house in Linden, Jersey, a few miles away from the Kennedys' home. Between her aunt and her mom, she was exposed to everything from Jimi Hendrix to Joni Mitchell to 1980s house acts like Gwen Guthrie, CeCe Rogers and Colonel Abrahams.
When Evans was 14, she sang in a touring gospel group, The Spiritual Uplifters, which performed in New York, Philadelphia and Connecticut. Its organizer, Sister Wilson, had some music-industry contacts and landed Evans a minor role in a Boogie Down Productions video for the 1989 single "You Must Learn," in which she played a student. It was her first brush with the world of hip hop. It wouldn't be her last.
First Lady of Bad Boy Records
After graduating from high school in 1991, Evans attended Fordham University in New York City on a full scholarship to study marketing but dropped out after a year. Soon after, she had her daughter, Chyna, with the music producer Kiyamma Griffin. The young family moved to LA for a while, but the relationship didn't work out, and Evans returned to Newark as a single mom, moving back in with Mae and Bob Kennedy. She found regular session work, earning $2,000 per week singing background vocals on demo tapes for R&B artists including Al B Sure and Christopher Williams. This got her noticed by a young impresario, Sean "Puffy" Combs, who had set up a label, Bad Boy Records, in 1993. Through Combs, Evans co-wrote lyrics for Mary J. Blige, and songs for Usher's self-titled debut album, released in 1994. That year, she became the first female artist to get signed by Bad Boy Records.
Marriage to the Notorious B.I.G.
In the summer of 1994, Evans met another up-and-coming artist, Christopher Wallace, aka the Notorious B.I.G, at a photo shoot for Bad Boy — and within a mere eight days of knowing each other, they were married. The ceremony was on August 4th in Rockland County, upstate New York; the bride wore a sleeveless white dress, the groom wore jeans and Timberlands. After the ceremony, they stopped to eat at a diner, before Biggie returned to Brooklyn and Evans headed to Jersey to pick up Chyna from her preschool nursery.
"It wasn't the most traditional way to start a life together," she wrote in Keep the Faith. "Smoking weed on the way to our wedding and stopping for greasy french fries on the way home. And we didn't even have plans for a household setup."
Evans was 21 years old. Her new husband was 22. Their marriage did not get off to the ideal start: they hardly saw each other. Evans was ensconced in a Brooklyn studio working on her first album; Wallace was away on tour — and, it would later transpire, was not being faithful to his wife.
A year after she was married, Evans released her debut solo album, Faith, in August 1995. She had written, or co-written, every song on the album except one (a cover of Rose Royce's "Love Don't Live Here Anymore"). The album was produced by the in-house Bad Boy production team The Hitmen, headed by Combs himself, and yielded four singles, the first two of which, "You Used to Love Me" and "Soon as I Get Home," were gold-certified hits. Faith would go on to sell more than one million copies in the US alone and be certified platinum by the RIAA.
Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. Rivalry
In October 1995, while Evans was working in Los Angeles, she was invited to record with Tupac Shakur. The rapper had recently been released from prison and had signed to Death Row Records, which was embroiled in an ugly beef with Bad Boy Records in New York — the label home of both Evans and the Notorious BIG. At the time, Evans was not aware that Tupac had signed for Death Row. Neither did she appreciate that Shakur believed her husband had been behind an attempt on his life in November 1994 — this being the pre-smartphone era, when rumors were slower to travel. Evans simply recalled that Wallace had always professed “mad love” for Shakur, as the pair had been friends before they became rivals. She did know that there had been tension between the two labels but hadn’t given the politics of her singing for Shakur much thought until she arrived at the recording studio and “realized there were a bunch of Death Row people there, so kind of in my mind I started figuring it out right there.”
Shakur was recording his debut album for Death Row records, All Eyez on Me, on which he embraced the gangsta rap lifestyle. But Evans’ contribution to the track "Wonda Why They Call U Bitch" never appeared on the album because, perhaps unsurprisingly, Death Row could not reach an agreement with Evans’ label, Bad Boy, to permit its use. Evans would later recall in her book, and in an interview with MTV, that she was asked to go to a hotel room after the recording session to pick up her $25,000 fee from Tupac. While she was there, he propositioned her “in a very surprising and offensive way,” but Evans refused. “This is totally not how I operate,” she wrote.
