[4] Broadnax was assigned female at birth, a fact which was only discovered upon his death and leads to confusion surrounding his early life.
[6] The two brothers moved to Los Angeles and joined Southern Gospel Singers, of which Willmer was a member of from 1939 to 1940; the group only performed on weekends and did not tour.
Label chief Art Rupe decided to drop them before they could record a follow-up, and shortly thereafter the Golden Echoes disbanded.
Along with Broadnax, the group featured two other leads – Jethro "Jet" Bledsoe, a bluesy crooner, and Silas Steele, an overpowering baritone.
Shortly after that, Broadnax moved on, working with The Fairfield Four, and in the early 1960s as one of the replacements for Archie Brownlee in the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi.
[7] Broadnax was killed in 1992 by his lover Lavina Richardson (who was age 42 at the time), who was later found guilty of involuntary manslaughter on February 4, 1993.
[5] This created a stir in the gospel community, with many prominent singers at the time insisting that they had suspected all along that his gender assigned at birth was female, including JoJo Wallace of the Sensational Nightingales who said, "I always wondered about Axe."
Broadnax was forced to keep his gender identity a secret by using the restroom alone, which also provoked from retrospective suspicion[clarification needed] by Claude Jeter who said, "Ax'd always go off by himself.