Martha Joe Benowitz Giles

Martha Joe Benowitz Giles, 90, ventured to her heavenly home on September 27th 2019 at 3pm. Our beloved Mother, Grandmother, & Great-grandmother left this world for a better home. She was born Martha Joe Tyler on March 18 1929 in Antioch Tennessee to Hugh and Mary Tyler. She was named after her father’s brother Joe Tyler. Martha was the youngest of seven children. Her father passed away of tetanus after stepping on a rusty nail while he was is his mid-thirties, when she was only eight months old, leaving her mother to raise her children. This was during the great depression and times were hard, especially in the south and most especially for a widow with seven young children. A few years later when Martha was five or six years old, she and her Brothers, Bill and Carson (who we all called Uncle Bim) performed on a local morning radio show WSM Radio in Nashville, TN as, “The Tyler Brothers (and little Martha Joe)”. Martha would say “I would have to stand on a box to sing and reach the mic”. The family moved to Atlanta while she was still in high school, and she attend Hapeville High.After graduation Martha worked for, Southern Bell as a telephone operator, also singing in clubs at night where she met her first husband Roy Benowitz while he was a house pianist at, The Domino Lounge. They married and traveled the country performing with many bands. They came back to Atlanta to have their first child, then shortly after they moved to California because her husband got an opportunity to score and play music in movies and television.Martha would sing in the band when they performed at nightclubs, even recording the song, “Near You”, with a very well known orchestra.Five later they divorced and Martha married a local Photographer Richard Giles who would dress up as Abe Lincoln and while on roller skates, charge to take pictures of the famous people partying in Hollywood. Their marriage gave them three more children, another son and two daughters.After separating from her second husband, she would work various jobs to take care of her four children. In 1965 at the urging of her mother on her death bed, she began passionately seeking the lord. She finally found solace in the church, working tirelessly. She attended The Lord Jesus Christ Pentecostal church in Jonesboro, GA under the leadership of Pastor Jack Ollis. She was baptized in Jesus Name on December 23rd 1964.God greatly magnified and blessed her with a large loving family. Four children, sixteen grandchildren, twenty-five great-grandchildren. Always falling her mother’s direction instructing all of them to seek the lord. She will be greatly missed, loved, and admired.We thank you for all the memories and love you unselfishly gave. We are all looking forward to wrapping our arms around you soon when we reunite with you again.The Funeral Service to honor and celebrate the life of Martha Joe Benowitz Giles will be held on Monday, September 30, 2019 at 11:00 AM at Tom M. Wages Snellville Chapel. Interment will follow at Friendship Presbyterian Church Cemetery, Jackson, GA. The family will receive friends on Sunday, September 29, 2019 from 6:00 PM until 8:00 PM at the funeral home.Condolences may be sent or viewed at www.wagesfuneralhome.com. Tom M. Wages Funeral Service, LLC, A Family Company, 3705 Highway 78 West, Snellville, GA 30039 (770-979-3200) has been entrusted with the arrangements.Read Obituary