Music - Black Gospel Research

The sheet music in this digital collection has been selected from the Sheet Music Collection at the John Hay Library at Brown University. One of the most important categories in the Sheet Music Collection is the African-Americana. This consists of music by and relating to African Americans, from the 1820s to the present day, and consists of approximately 6,000 items. Of that number, 1,700 items are fully cataloged in MARC format, from which the titles digitized in this project have been drawn.

The purpose of this project is to identify, acquire, preserve, record and catalogue the most at-risk music from the Black gospel music tradition. This collection primarily contains 78s, 45s, LPs, and the various tape formats issued in the United States and abroad between the 1940s and the 1980s. The ultimate goal is to have a copy of every song released by every Black gospel artist or group during that time period.

The GMHA is an effort to preserve the legacy of gospel music in a state-of-the-art digital archive. The GMHA digitizes and catalogues important documents and makes them available in a searchable database to scholars, gospel artists, librarians, church historians, teachers, and anyone with Internet access.

The Black Newspapers Collection presents newspapers, including college papers, that were owned by, operated by, or intended for Black communities in Illinois. These titles focus on the 20th century, but range from 1897 (the only surviving issue of the Chicago Reflector) to 2003 (the Lincolnian.) The papers chart the growth of Illinois’ Black population and the resulting development of Black culture, arts, and civic engagement.

African American Gospel music is a form of euphoric, rhythmic, spiritual music rooted in the solo and responsive church singing of the African American South. Its development coincided with -- and is germane to -- the development of rhythm and blues.

The Frances G. Spencer Collection of American Sheet Music is one of the few collections of its kind and size in the country. Acquired by Baylor University in 1965, this collection of approximately 30,000 titles was the life-long pursuit of the avid and well-respected sheet music collector for whom the collection is named.