This gospel volume includes late nineteenth-century selections that accompanied the invitations issued by George W. Willis (1864–1934), a Quaker evangelist who preached at revivals alongside his wife, sought-after temperance lecturer Genevieve Kinsel Willis (1864–1940). Kinsel Willis later earned her Doctor of Music before joining the faculty of the West Side Musical College in Cleveland, Ohio, where the Willis family made its home. Wide Awake Songs features primarily older gospel songs that would have been familiar to Willis’s revival audiences. The volume was issued by the Evangelical Association of North America, a predominantly German-speaking body of Arminian Christians. This partnership with a non-Quaker publisher prefigured Willis’s official defection from the Society of Friends to the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1907.

—Erin Fulton