The Willis Clan — a musical family of 12 children, and the stars of their own reality TV show — takes the stage in a sold-out show at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center on Saturday.
The photogenic Nashville-based brood divide their act between song and dance, merging — according to the Willis parents — “their Irish roots with other music and dance genres to create a unique blend of the old and new.”
According to the Clan’s website (note: in titling the TV show, TLC traded “clan” for the more digestible “family”): “The Willis Clan is a family of amazing musicians, dancers, athletes, writers, and artists. … We like to enjoy the full spectrum of life. We do music, dance, art, crafts, writing, as well as horses, wrestling, homemade cooking, swimming in the creek, and snuggling up before our fireplace warming our log cabin. We even have a front porch swing.
“Our children have won regional and national dance titles and placed in world competitions for both music and dance. The boys have won state titles in folk style, freestyle, and Greco-Roman wrestling.”
And this list probably understates it. Entering “Willis Clan” into your preferred search engine turns up an audio-visual tableau of musical high-achievement enough to dim (even if only slightly) your opinions of your own children.
Irish dance, folk song, pop, rock, and R&B ballads, ballroom dance and swing — the Willises, ranging in age from 5 to 23, seem to excel at it all, and in so doing join a short list of famous musical families (think more Osmonds than Jackson 5).
This blonde string of genetic miracles is the work of parents Toby and Brenda Willis, and are, in alphabetical order: Jackson, Jada, Jaeger, Jamie, Jasmine (aka “Jazz Kat”), Jeanette (known as “Jet”), Jedidiah (“Jedi”), Jennifer, Jeremiah, Jessica Jane, Joy and Juliette.
Whether the shadow of sibling rivalry has ever passed across the squeaky clean faces of the Willis children, when they join together on stage, they appear, in their respective contributions to the moment, completely bonded in their joy of performance.
Still, no family entirely avoids the debris of life. If “America’s most talented family” — to quote again from their website — has led a charmed life, it’s not because they’ve been untouched by grief.
In 1994, Toby, the progenitor of the 12 Willis kids, lost six of his younger siblings in a fiery van accident on a highway in northern Illinois. If it’s not the reason he’s surrounded himself with a joyous mega-family of his own, perhaps it’s at least one of life’s consolations. Not long ago, his daughter Jenny, then 19, wrote a song dedicated to the six dead children, “The Road to Watertown,” an affecting version of which you can find online, and which — even though, as Jenny has said in interviews, it doesn’t return those children to life or keep life’s tragedies at bay — seems, in its submerged beauty, a fine kind of defiance.
