Watkins was born in
Atlanta, Georgia, in 1939. When she was about 12 years old, her family moved to
Commerce, Georgia. She began playing music in school, and, in high school, she played bass for a band called Billy West Stone and the Down Beats. Around the year 1959, she was introduced to
Piano Red, who had a daily radio show on
WAOK, and she subsequently joined Piano Red and the Meter-tones, who played in a number of towns in the Atlanta area, and then Atlanta clubs such as the Magnolia Ballroom and the Casino, before starting to tour throughout the southeast, primarily at colleges. Her 1999
CD debut,
Back in Business, earned a
W. C. Handy Award nomination in 2000. Watkins was playing internationally (for example, the Main Stage at the
Ottawa Blues Fest in 2004) as well as in her hometown Atlanta until temporarily sidelined by surgery in 2005, but recovered. She performed a set at the 2008 Cognac Blues Festival. Watkins died after a heart attack on October 1, 2019, at the age of 80. ==Discography==