Today, the Recording Academy announced its recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award during the Special Merit Awards ceremony this year.
In this year’s cohort, the Clark Sisters, Gladys Knight, N.W.A, Donna Summer, are the 2024 Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award honorees; hip-hop pioneer DJ Kool Herc is a Trustees Award recipient; and “Refugee,”written by K’naan, Steve McEwan, and Gerald Eaton (a.k.a. Jarvis Church), is being honored with the Best Song For Social Change Award.
“The Academy is honored to pay tribute to this year’s Special Merit Award recipients — a remarkable group of creators and industry professionals whose impact resonates with generations worldwide,” said Harvey Mason jr., CEO of the Recording Academy.
Of the honorees, the Recording Academy said of the Clark Sisters, a gospel group “initially consisting of five sisters: Jacky, Denise, Elbernita, Dorinda, and Karen – have been taking the world by storm since the early 1980s. Credited for helping to bring gospel music to the mainstream, the Clark Sisters are considered pioneers of contemporary gospel,” naming some of their biggest gospel hits, “Is My Living in Vain,” “You Brought The Sunshine,” “Endow Me,” and “Jesus Is A Love Song.” Altogether, the group has three Grammy awards.
On the other hand Knight, a seven-time Grammy winner, is a talent who has managed to crossover multiple genres. In her decades-long career, she’s “recorded more than 38 albums over the years including four solo albums.”
N.W.A, also nominated, is largely credited for inventing gangsta rap. The group, consisting of Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, DJ Yella, and MC-Ren, “developed a new sound, which brought in many of the loud, extreme sonic innovations of Public Enemy while adopting a self-consciously violent and dangerous lyrical stance.”
Donna Summer, a five-time Grammy winner and 18-time nominee, was the first “artist to win the GRAMMY for Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female (1979, “Hot Stuff”) as well as the first-ever recipient of the new GRAMMY Category for Best Dance Recording (1997, “Carry On”). She was also the first female artist to win GRAMMY Awards in four different genres: dance, gospel, rock, and R&B. Summer holds the record with three consecutive double albums to hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts (the only solo artist to ever accomplish this), and first female artist to have four No. 1 singles in a 12-month period on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.
Finally, the highly regarded founder of the genre go hip-hop, Kool Herc, will receive a Trustee honor, for his contributions to music. According to the Recording Academy, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee “is not a rapid rapper who keeps your head spinning with a patter, but he is a musical innovator to the turntables.”
The Special Merit Awards will occur on Saturday, Feb.3, during GRAMMY Week 2024.