Steven Curtis Chapman is an American singer, songwriter, record producer, actor, voice actor, author, and social activist. He is best known for his Christian music for which he has won five Grammy Awards and 58 Gospel Music Association Dove Awards.
For Disney, he voiced Thomas O'Malley in five episodes of Disney's House of Mouse, Baloo and additional voices in the video game The Jungle Book Rhythm n' Groove, and voiced the live-action version of Baloo in the Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers feature film. He was also one of the most frequent performers for the Night of Joy music festival at Walt Disney World in Florida, having performed at the event in ten different years: 1990, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1997, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2013.
Steven Curtis Chapman was born in Paducah, Kentucky. Chapman's father is a guitar teacher in Paducah, and young Steven and older brother Herb Jr. grew up playing the guitar and singing. Upon finishing high school, Chapman enrolled as a pre-med student at Georgetown College in Kentucky. After several semesters, he transferred to Anderson College in Indiana, but soon dropped out and went to Nashville to pursue a career in music while briefly attending Belmont University. He began working a music show at Opryland USA while dedicating time to songwriting.
In 1987, Chapman released his first album First Hand, which included the song "Weak Days", which peaked at No. 2 on the Contemporary Christian Music chart. In 1992, Chapman made a successful shift into a more mainstream audience with his album The Great Adventure. He has since continued recording, writing and performing music worldwide.
Roles[]
Trivia[]
- His being cast as O'Malley in House of Mouse adds a sense of irony to that show's running gag of O'Malley and the Alley Cats consistently losing their chance to perform at the show's titular night club, in that Chapman, himself an actual singer, was cast as a singing character, but who never actually got to sing on the show, with his only lines instead having been spoken dialogue.
- Chapman would have performed at Night of Joy for his eleventh time in 2017, but all performances for the Saturday of September 9 (the day Chapman was scheduled to perform) were canceled due to the danger posed by Hurricane Irma, which had struck the entire state of Florida that very weekend.
- It is no coincidence that both of Chapman's Disney roles have been characters who were originally voiced by Phil Harris. Chapman is a fan of both characters, with Baloo being one of his favorite Disney characters. He even auditioned to voice Baloo in 2003's The Jungle Book 2 before the role was ultimately given to John Goodman. He would finally get to voice Baloo nineteen years later in the aforementioned 2022 Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers movie, in which he even briefly got to perform "Bare Necessities" for a scene.
