Singer Delores Washington-Green of legendary gospel group The Caravans dead at 82

Delores Washington-Green sang with the legendary gospel group The Caravans and also had a thriving solo career. | Provided

Delores Washington-Green, whose silvery soprano sweetened the music of the legendary gospel group The Caravans, has died at 82.

Mrs. Washington-Green, who faced various forms of cancer five times since the 1970s, died Wednesday to complications of the disease at the Markham home of her niece Verlda Brown, according to her son Leonidas “Lee” Green.

She was rooted in the music of the Black church and also trained at a music conservatory.

“She could [sing] very light and very lovely,” said gospel music historian Robert Marovich, “and get down in her emotions and pull out her feelings when the spirit led her.”

Young Delores looked up to the legendary Albertina Walker, a fellow Caravan who was considered one of the first ladies of gospel. She said “Tina” was like a big sister, looking out for her in the music business and teaching her about life on the road, where they sometimes had to eat in the back of restaurants in the Jim Crow-era South.

Gospel singer Delores Washington-Green.

She joined The Caravans in 1958. Around that time, the lineup also included Walker, Inez Andrews, Shirley Caesar and Cassietta George. Eddie Williams, who played piano with The Caravans, told Walker about his fellow Robbins resident when the group was seeking a soprano.

“Albertina recruited her on Eddie Williams’ recommendation,” said Marovich, who first reported Mrs. Washington-Green’s death on the Journal of Gospel Music.

“She was a trained singer, and you could hear it in her voice,” said Marovich, a Grammy-nominated album notes writer and author of the 2015 book “A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music.” “Nobody else in The Caravans had that ability to call forward almost operatic training.”

The combination of their voices was spine-tingling. A 1994 Sun-Times story called The Caravans “the Mount Rushmore of gospel.”

Even as she developed a thriving solo career, Mrs. Washington-Green remained a stalwart of The Caravans. As she once put it, “They can come, and they can go, and they can come, and they can go, but I ain’t going nowhere.”

She also sang with the Shirley Wahls Singers. The group toured Europe, where Wahls said audiences connected with “her voice and her delivery and her sincerity.”

Until January, Mrs. Washington-Green was still performing.

“She was still doing the Lord’s work,” her son said. “It wasn’t anything about the money. It was about what the Lord motivated her to do.”

Delores Washington-Green (center) performing with The Caravans, Pastor Shirley Caesar (left) and Dorothy Norwood at the funeral Dec. 28, 2012, of fellow Caravan and gospel legend Inez Andrews at Apostolic Church of God.

One of her favorite hymns was “Give Me a Clean Heart.” She loved having people over, cooking them dinner and then enjoying a spirited game of bid whist.

In addition to her son Lee, survivors include her husband Charles Green, a member of the Pilgrim Jubilee Singers, son Thomas Green, six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are pending.