Deborah Fraser is a South African gospel artist with a solo career spanning close to decade and more than a million units sold, cementing her status as a singer of incomparable power in the tradition of richly melodious, faith-based pleasant music. Born in 1966 in KwaMashu in the KwaZulu Natal province, she started singing at school. Initially staying in Durban, she moved to Johannesburg, in the Gauteng province in 1985 to seek for greener pastures in the recording industry. She started out working with composer, singer and gospel producer Mthunzi Namba who also hails from her province. She rose to prominence after announcing that she is the voice being used in many songs that were only credited to the late Brenda Fassie.
She later featured in the Maria Le Maria project alongside Fassie, Lundi Tyamara and Peter Mokoena in a Chicco Twala-produced album before launching her successful solo career. Deborah was a backing singer for musicians like Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Fassie, Lucky Dube and many others. Together with contemporaries like Stella Khumalo, Mandisa Dlanga and Faith Kekana, they were the busiest session musicians. The quartet worked with every musician who needed to quality voices in their productions and ended up on almost every album produced in the country for the past seventeen years. In the early nineties, she toured around the world with former exiles Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Letta Mbulu and Caiphus Semenya. She lost her son, Mbuso, after birth in 1996.
Deborah Fraser’s widely publicised marriage to a Nigerian pastor, Sockey Okeke, hit turbulent waters hardly a year after the couple got married in a traditional wedding.[1] When contacted by Sowetan newspaper, Fraser said she was not prepared to discuss her private life in the newspapers. She is a winner of the first SABC Crown Gospel Music award in the Best Female Artist category, amongst other awards.[2][3][4]