Miss Evelyn Tyler & the Tyler Singers

Miss Evelyn Tyler & the Tyler Singers

15073 – He Won't Forsake His Own
15074 - Precious Lord

Cleveland Tyler, Arr. & Director

Shippings Records
3126a Easton Ave.
St. Louis, MO

1965

“My earliest memory I was singing with my dad…a quartet singer,” said Evelyn Turrentine-Agee about her singing career. “He’d hold me up and say, ‘Sing baby sing.’”

Sing she did, first in a girl quartet group formed by her father, Cleveland Tyler, The Tylerettes and then – by age 17 – singing in a quartet with her male cousins.

Evelyn and her family got their first real break after her father befriended a man by the name of Artie Shippings. When Mr. Shippings discovered how talented her father was, he started his own record label and signed her father to it. Because of Evelyn’s interest and talent in performing Gospel music, her father also formed and managed a young female quartet group for her on the same label. Evelyn’s first quartet group was an all-female, teenage quartet called “The Tylerettes.” Evelyn was only 13 years old at that time. But managing five teenage girls proved to be too much for Evelyn’s father, so he replaced the other four girls in the group with four of Evelyn’s male cousins. And Evelyn’s father changed the name of her group from “The Tylerettes” to “The Tyler Singers.”

The very first song that “The Tyler Singers” recorded onto was an old Gospel song favorite called “Precious Lord.” However, just as things were looking up, “The Tyler Singers” broke up. The split occurred after Evelyn married Curtis Turrentine in 1962. Curtis Turrentine was an electrical engineer. So shortly, after they were married, Curtis relocated his new bride to Detroit, MI to be near his family and he had heard jobs were more plentiful in Detroit.

While in college earning her degree from the University of Detroit she continued singing as a member of the Masonettes, the Gospel Echoettes and in her own group the Gospel Warriors.

Evelyn would take a 10-year hiatus from the Gospel music scene but the Holy Spirit told her “to stop feeling sorry about her career and to get up and work.” So in 1999, after receiving orders from on high to continue waging her war on sin, Evelyn for W.O.S. (War On Sin) Records and recorded her first project entitled, God Did It.


Her father, Bro. Cleveland Tyler (1920-2006) started a popular gospel quartet music group called The Gospel Melody Men in the 1940's.

Shippings Records (partial ) discography

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