Willie Mae Ford Smith (June 23, 1904 – February 2, 1994) was an American musician and Christian evangelist instrumental in the development and spread of gospel music in the United States.

Smith started the St. Louis chapter and became the director of the national organization's Soloist's Bureau, training up and coming singers in the gospel blues style.

"[1] Born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, Willie Mae was the seventh of fourteen children of Clarence Ford, a railroad brakeman, and Mary Williams.

[2] Willie Mae became familiar with blues from hearing it coming from a disreputable clubhouse adjacent to her family's Memphis back yard when she was still a toddler.

The Fords moved to St. Louis, Missouri in 1917, and Mary started a restaurant where Willie Mae worked after dropping out of school in the eighth grade.

[4] They fostered a love of singing, eventually encouraging Willie Mae and her sisters Mary, Emma, and Geneva to perform at their local church, True Light.

As her sisters grew, married, and had families, Willie Mae continued as a soloist, even after her 1924 marriage to James Smith, a man 19 years her senior who owned a general hauling business.

However, at the 1926 National Baptist Convention, she heard a woman named Artelia Hutchins singing in a new style and changed her mind: "I knew then I had to be a gospel singer.

[5] In 1930, Smith had an auspicious meeting with Thomas A. Dorsey, a blues musician who had attempted to make a living writing gospel music without success.

Smith furthermore started her tenure running the Education Department of the National Baptist Convention; a role that lasted 17 years.

On the train coming back to St. Louis, I kept everybody up all night long, trying to talk, speaking in tongues.... Honey, this child got soused good.

A year later, she experienced a deep spiritual conversion when she underwent baptism in the Holy Spirit, whereupon she began speaking in tongues, leading her to become a member of the Church of God Apostolic.

She rejected the secular music she previously enjoyed, saying the blues and jazz artists such as Count Basie, Bessie Smith, and Cab Calloway no longer held any appeal for her.

The blend of spoken word spiritual messages delivered alongside religious songs became known as the song-and-sermonette style of preaching, something that Smith was profoundly adept at doing.

Smith was not shy about arriving to her own engagements hours late to find the entire church full and eagerly awaiting her.

"[1][11] Former student Martha Bass recalls in addition to rehearsing songs, Smith's instruction addressed how to enter and exit the church, and how to speak and behave in front of the congregation.

[5] Roberta Martin used Smith's arrangement of "What A Friend We Have In Jesus" as her signature song, as did J. Earle Hines of the St. Paul Baptist Church in South-Central Los Angeles, with "God Be With You".

[1] Several singers admit to being directly inspired to sing gospel blues after hearing Smith, including Edna Gallmon Cooke, Myrtle Scott, Goldia Haynes, and "Brother" Joe May.

"[2] Her devotion and belief that God had called her to travel and minister to people through song was unshakable, though it disrupted her family's life and she felt a keen sadness at leaving her own children behind.

She ended the decade on a high note, however, joining Mahalia Jackson for an Easter Sunrise concert at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles in 1949.

This led to her participation at a gospel concert alongside Marion Williams and Jessy Dixon at Radio City Music Hall.

Reviewing the concert, the New York Times, described Smith's manner as an "evangelical seriousness that more closely resembled operatic stage presence".

Smith was the primary focus of the critically acclaimed documentary film Say Amen, Somebody, released in 1982, where she describes her efforts to spread gospel and the obstacles she faced when first getting started.

She also mentors a young Zella Jackson Price, who expresses her difficulty reconciling the need to be at home with her family while being called on by God to sing.

As observed by Harper Barnes, a reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "as she kept speaking her words grew louder and stronger and turned into a hypnotic chant and the audience began responding as if the soaring parapets of the Fox were the walls of a church".

[24] In her heyday, Dorsey considered her more talented than blues singer Bessie Smith had she deigned to record secular music.

In Black Music Research Journal, William Dargan writes, "Singing has been for Willie Mae Ford Smith a world in which she lives, rather than a mere phase of life she has picked up and put down.

"[15] However, outside of the gospel blues niche, she was relatively unknown until the release of Say Amen, Somebody when mainstream media began to try to quantify Smith's vocal abilities and their effects on the listener.

Smith's delivery was described by Richard Harrington in the Washington Post as "a free, physical style that emphasized the beat and seemed closer to jazz and blues than to spirituals".

[28] Holding Smith responsible for the creation and popularization of the song-and-sermonette method of preaching, the National Endowment for the Arts attributes her influence to "her distinctive singing style, which brought to the gospel repertoire the range of vocal effects she heard as a young girl in country churches.