Viola Wills
Viola Mae Wilkerson (December 30, 1939 – May 6, 2009), known professionally as Viola Wills, was an American pop and R&B singer, best known for her covers of classics and other standards such as Patience and Prudence's "Gonna Get Along Without You Now" (1979), Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind" (1980), The Drifters' "Up on the Roof" (1980), "Always Something There To Remind Me" by Burt Bacharach and Hal David (1980), the Doris Day single "Secret Love" (1980), Chicago's "If You Leave Me Now" (1981) and Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" (1986). She also recorded one of the few dance versions of the Burt Bacharach and Hal David classic "A House Is Not a Home" (1994), which is a different song from the similarly titled "House Is Not a Home" by Deborah Cox.
Her cover of the Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler torch song "Stormy Weather" peaked at #4 on the Billboard U.S. Hot Dance Club Play charts in 1982, the highest position the song has reached since Billboard began tracking music sales in 1947, although the original 1933 version sung by Ethel Waters at the Cotton Club in Harlem and later, the early 1940s rendition by Lena Horne, sold quite well and became much better known.
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