There are only a handful of people alive today who participated in the formation of modern gospel music in Chicago during the 1930s and 1940s. Fewer still worked directly with the genre’s founding mothers and fathers in those early days. Perhaps only one of them can claim to have also taught Aretha Franklin a hymn that became her first commercial single as a soloist.
Floriene watson Willis is that person.
Turning 99 on Dec. 6, she never became a major star, but still held a prominent position as gospel music formed and flourished in Chicago some 90 years ago. “I wasn’t too worried about being popular,” she said during a recent video interview from her current home in Lakewood, Washington. “I just sang to the glory of God because it was down in me to sing God’s praises, and that’s what I did.”
Floriene O. Watson was born in 1926 in Chicago, the eighth of 10 children to Amos and Laura Watson, migrants from South Carolina. The family lived at 430 East 42nd Street. Floriene attended Wendell Phillips High School, where she played tuba in the school band. “A medium-sized tuba, not the big tuba,” she laughed.
It wasn’t surprising that she was in the band. The Watson Family had a particular passion for music. Amos, the patriarch, sang. Floriene’s sister Loretta played drums. Another sister, Sylvia Hoston, parlayed her piano skills into an accompanist position at Rev. Elijah Thurston’s Forty-fourth Street Baptist Church (now New Covenant Missionary Baptist Church).”Sylvia could really play the piano,” Floriene said. “She had a style all of her own.”
There was even a family singing group.The Watson Family Singers consisted of Floriene, Loretta, Alice, Vivian, romance, Irvin, and Sylvia, who accompanied on piano. According to Floriene, the family cut a record, “Jesus Gave Me Water,” sometime in the 1950s, “for a small-class label.”
The Watsons were steadfast members of All Nations Pentecostal Church, founded on the South Side on New Year’s Day 1918 by Elder Lucy Smith, one of the city’s first Black female pastors. smith was also among the first Black ministers to harness the power of radio to spread their ministries to people who might never enter their churches. Floriene played an integral part in the weekly broadcast, called “the Glorious Church of the Air.” “When we would broadcast over the radio,” she said, “I would sing ‘Just Tell Jesus, Tell Him All,’ before the prayer.”
Radio exposure not only gained fans for Floriene,it also led to a marriage proposal. Upon hearing her sing over the All Nations broadcast, Emeal Willis, a World War II veteran who arrived in Chicago from Louisiana, couldn’t wait to meet the woman with the beautiful voice. The two married and had 11 children.
Floriene Watson Willis also sang with the smith Trio,a gospel singing group organized by Elder Smith’s granddaughter,vocalist and pianist “Little Lucy” Smith. Besides Smith and watson, the group included alto Gladys Beamon Gregory. The three sang on the All Nations radio broadcasts and on multi-artist gospel programs sponsored by area churches like Antioch Baptist, Tabernacle baptist, and Metropolitan Community Church. “The Smith Trio was pretty popular,” Floriene remarked. “we were good!”
Over time, Floriene penned two gospel songs, “Hold on and Say Yes to the Lord” and “It’s Been a Long Tedious Journey.”
In a 2009 interview, Floriene’s brother Romance Watson (who died in 2022) recalled that in their youth, he and his sisters, including Willis, had the chance to sing with Sallie Martin and Thomas A. Dorsey, the celebrated Mother and Father of Gospel.
Worth a look