“The Saviour Home Record Library,” an anthology of Los Angeles gospel choirs in the 1960s, is being made available online by the Black Gospel Archive and Listening Center at Baylor University. Compiled by B-movie filmmaker Jim “Buddy” Ball, the 40-album set features tracks that he had recorded with fellow USC student and musician Carl Matthes.
Matthes connected Ball to his friend J. David Bowick, the choir director at Holman Methodist Church in West Adams, who wanted to have a tape recording of his choir performing Haydn’s “Third Mass” converted to vinyl. After successfully pressing the record, Ball and Matthes realized that other local churches might want to do the same. They established Ball Records, recording choirs from Trinity Baptist, Pilgrim Baptist, Second Baptist, Friendship Baptist, and the First AME Church of Pasadena. Performances by artists such as a young Billy Preston, Sondra “Blinky” Williams, and local luminary Thurston Frazier are captured on the albums.
Hannah Engstrom, audio digitization specialist at Baylor University Libraries, who made the initial contact with Matthes to acquire the anthology, emphasizes the historical value of these recordings.
“What was most compelling was that the music was so unique,” she says. “Most of this music had never been reissued outside of the ‘Saviour Home Record Library’ [and] … would have been completely lost, so we really wanted to save that music and … make it available for people to listen to.”
The “Saviour Home Record Library” is expected to be made available online sometime in May, as part of Baylor’s Black Gospel Music Preservation Program (BGMPP), which was co-founded in 2006 by Robert Darden, professor emeritus of journalism at Baylor, and private donor Charles Royce. Darden is the author of more than two dozen books, including, “People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music,” and “Soon and Very Soon: The Transformative Music and Ministry of Andraé Crouch,” which was published in March by Oxford University Press.
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: https://library.web.baylor.edu/gospel
https://library.web.baylor.edu/discover/black-gospel-archive/black-gospel-archive-listening-center
https://www.discogs.com/label/800426-Ball-Records-5
https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/the-b-movie-maker-preserved-music-los-angeles-black-churches/
https://www.pbs.org/show/gospel/
Darryl Stuhr, director of Digitization and Digital Collection Preservation Services, delineates how the BGMPP supports Baylor’s mission as a private Christian university.
“Other universities are saving jazz, and to our knowledge at that time, there was nobody saving gospel,” he says. “When we started on it, we thought it might go a few years… but it was the exact opposite. Most of our projects are … we’re going to work with this archive and digitize these materials, and then we’re going to put them online and … voilà, there’s a digital collection. It’s not going to end.”
Stuhr says that gospel recordings outside of the mainstream are often overlooked and when collectors pass away, are discarded by family members who may not realize the materials’ historical value.
“We were at great risk to lose some rare and unique material… unique to the United States and very important for cultural heritage, with the Civil Rights Movement,” he says.
To date, 11,846 albums have been digitized by the BGMPP – including album jacket art, sleeves, and other ephemera, and 69,450 audio tracks have been digitized from 45, 33 1/3, and 78 rpm records; Sturhr says that he would like the archive to reach 100,000 before he retires.
Engstrom says that except for several recordings from the Los Angeles area, the “Saviour Home Record Library” is the only complete and cohesive package from L.A. in the collection.
“There is a lot of representation from Detroit and Chicago – those are the cities that are always talked about with gospel music,” says Stephen Bolech, audiovisual digitization studio manager, who traveled to Los Angeles in February with Engstrom and Travis Taylor, audiovisual film and imaging manager, to collect the records from Matthes and to conduct an oral history interview with him at his Winnetka home. “This was cool because L.A. is kind of a high second-tier gospel city, and we didn’t have much representing that area before this.”
Taylor was amazed at the scope of Ball Records and how one opportunity to press a record turned into an entire enterprise that is now being preserved for posterity.
“I think it was Carl who described it best [as] a great snapshot of the state of Black gospel music in L.A. at this time,” says Taylor. “The more I learned about what we had, the more excited I was getting. This is exactly what the program is trying to do … to preserve this one-of-a-kind music that otherwise wouldn’t get preserved or shared.”
The Black Gospel Archive has been used extensively by professors at Baylor in teaching across academic programs including its history department, the George W. Truett Theological Seminary, and the School of Music. Artists and scholars have also benefitted from the BGA’s resources, including historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who conducted research there for his PBS documentary, “Gospel.”
Engstrom says that the staff has begun a collaboration with the Museum of Christian and Gospel Music and Hall of Fame, which is set to open in Nashville this fall, and looks forward to working with more museums and institutions in the future.
“What makes this work so exciting for me is knowing how important it is for those who have connections to this music,” she says. “Many people who have toured the Archive … have expressed how happy they are to know that this music is being preserved and made accessible. Black gospel was immensely influential on other genres of music and is an underappreciated but very vital part of our music’s history, and I’m thrilled to play a small role in helping to tell that part of the story.”
Visit the Baylor University Black Gospel Archive and Listening Center at
https://library.web.baylor.edu/discover/black-gospel-archive/black-gospel-archive-listening-center
