Willie Max

Hailing from Detroit, the R&B trio Willie Max consisted of the Smith sisters Rose, Sky, and Lyric. Their careers began in the late 1980s while the siblings were still teenagers and performed as the Smith Reflections, sharing bills with acts such as Tony! Toni! Tone!, whose Raphael Saddiq took on the role of mentor. The group later adopted the name Willie Max, drawn from the first names of their father and mother, and issued their debut album Bona Fide in 1998 as the inaugural release on Saddiq’s Pookie Records label.