Hello, I'm Lee Williams. I'm lead singer for The Spiritual QC's of Tupelo, Mississippi.
I was born and raised in Tupelo. These guys are all come in from towns I never heard of. Anyway, I've been in Tupelo all my life and started singing gospel when I was about 8 years old and sang gospel and drove tractor trailer for, like, 24 years, and then the Lord decided that he give me a choice to drive truck or come on the road. And naturally, I 'took to comin' on the road 'cause I love singing.
When You Gonna Wake Up that song means to me, it's not pointin' a finger at anybody; it's not singling anybody out. It's a song that I took personally for myself. There's a lot of things that I'm not aware of, that I want to become aware of, I wanna know what's what, and it's not that--some things that you know about that there's nothin' you can do about it. But then, there are a lot of things we can, and that's what we want to do is wake up and do something about it.
I would have to say my biggest influence was the guy that started me singing when I didn't wanna sing; he said I was gonna sing, and I did. That was my mom's baby brother, Mitchell Thornton. He started me to sing and so he was one of my biggest mentor. After he made me do it for a while, I began to love it, you know, wanted to do it myself. So, and then guys like the Pilgrim Jubilees, The Mighty Clouds, The Fairfield Four--a lot of those guys really influenced me into singing gospel music.
