Magnolia Lewis-Butts

Magnolia N. Lewis-Butts was an African American singer, choir director, songwriter, and gospel-music pioneer born in Tipton, Missouri, about 1880. She became active in Chicago's Black sacred-music life and worked in the choral tradition associated with J. Wesley Jones. By the early 1930s she was directing gospel singers at Metropolitan Community Church and participating in the emerging movement that joined older choral discipline with the newer gospel sound.

In late 1931 Lewis-Butts worked with Thomas A. Dorsey and Theodore R. Frye in organizing the gospel choir at Ebenezer Baptist Church, identified by the Encyclopedia of Chicago as Chicago's first gospel choir. She was also among the organizers of the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses; the NCGCC's own history names her with Dorsey, Frye, Sallie Martin, and Henry J. Carruthers among those who organized the first convention in 1933 and prepared its first bylaws. Her work places her among the women who helped shape gospel music institutionally as well as musically.

Lewis-Butts wrote both words and music for “Let It Breathe on Me.” A short form is copyrighted in 1941, while a fuller stanza-and-refrain form is commonly indexed as 1942. She died in Chicago on December 10, 1949. Reliable sources document her work in several church settings but do not establish a single personal denominational affiliation with enough certainty to assign one here.