Gospel singer and songwriter Dottie Peoples is one of Georgia’s most renowned figures in Christian music. Hailed as the “Songbird of the South” by the late radio host Esmond J. Patterson, Peoples has been compared to gospel and rhythm-and-blues artists Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, and Patti LaBelle.
The first African American to sing at La Scala in Milan, Italy, and the first African-American woman to be offered a long-term contract by the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York.
Gertrude Johnson OBE was an Australian opera singer, arts educator and administrator.
A charismatic country blues singer and fingerstyle guitarist of the Piedmont tradition, Precious Bryant stands out among Georgia’s great blueswomen.
Babbie Mason is an African American contemporary Christian singer-songwriter and author. Her song “All Rise” was one of the most-recorded contemporary Christian songs of the 1990s.
In 2023 Nathalie Stutzmann made history by becoming the first woman to direct the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the second woman to lead a major American orchestra, after MacArthur Fellow Marin Alsop.
Francine Reed, Atlanta’s “queen of the blues,” was born in Illinois in 1947. In the 1990s she relocated to Georgia and soon became one of Atlanta’s most beloved performers.
Reed’s career was cemented on the foundation of a musically rich family. Her father was a gospel singer and her sister Margo Reed became a noted jazz singer. As the youngest of six siblings, Reed began performing
Irish comic actress, singer, and writer
As one of Motown’s leading ladies of soul in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Gladys Knight was the driving force behind Gladys Knight and the Pips, an all-family music group from Atlanta.
African-American gospel singer and evangelist