Miggie Lewis
Miggie Lewis was a singer with the Lewis Family of Lincolnton, Georgia, the group known as the “First Family of Bluegrass Gospel.” The eldest of the eight children of Roy “Pop” and Pauline “Mom” Lewis, she sang with her parents, brothers and sisters, and later their children, for 58 years, until the group disbanded in 2009.
She was born Nannie Omega Lewis in Augusta, Georgia, on 22 May 1926. Her brothers had been playing country music and fiddle tunes as the Lewis Brothers since 1947. When the rest of the family joined in 1951, the group became the Lewis Family and sang only gospel from then on. In its classic lineup Pop Lewis played bass, Wallace guitar, Talmadge mandolin and fiddle, and Little Roy banjo, and the three daughters, Miggie, Polly and Janis, sang.
The family first recorded in 1953, and the sides came out on Sullivan Records in 1954. In April of that year they began a live Sunday television show on WJBF in Augusta, which ran for 38 years. After three singles for Hollywood, a subsidiary of King Records, they joined Starday in 1958. On the Starday EP Born of the Spirit (1959) the three sisters sing together, with Wallace taking the lead on part of it.
From the early 1960s the family worked full time in music. They traveled by bus and played their first bluegrass festival in 1969 at Hugo, Oklahoma. Their shows set trio numbers by the three sisters beside Little Roy’s banjo and comedy, with Pop as emcee. From 1970 they made 23 albums in fourteen years for Canaan Records. Among them was I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal (1981), recorded in Nashville, on which Miggie, Polly and Janis are among the singers.
The Lewis Family entered the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in 1992 and the Gospel Music Association’s Hall of Fame in 2005. The IBMA gave the family its Distinguished Achievement Award in 2002 and inducted it into its Hall of Fame in 2006. After the deaths of Mom, Pop and Wallace, the group disbanded in 2009. Miggie Lewis died on 26 December 2017 in a hospital in Augusta, at 91.
