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Welcome to Gloryland Jubilee, my new Web-based discography! I especially want to thank those of you who are familiar with Rockin' Country Style (my first record research project) for giving this new site a look. GJ's intended audience is people like you who collect American secular roots music but have picked up religious recordings and want to know more about them.
The first question many will ask is why I have devoted so much time and effort to creating a discography of white sacred and gospel music. The most basic answer is that I enjoy the music and want to encourage other people to explore it. Many of the characteristics that appeal to enthusiasts of roots music can be found here (and, in some cases, had their origin here).
In addition, from a discographical standpoint this is a fascinating field. While there were a few prominent artists on major national labels, most releases appeared on nameless private labels, custom series, and local or regional labels. As a result, there is even more chaos than is usually the case with the record industry. This genre is in desperate need of control but hitherto has received comparatively little attention from collectors and discographers.
Defining the scope for a project like this is always tricky. No two researchers would approach it quite the same way. Here are some of the guidelines I have tried to employ.
This discography is limited to white sacred and gospel music. Why? For decades black gospel music has enjoyed the loving attention of many dedicated and careful scholars, the culmination being Cedric J. Hayes and Robert Laughton's Gospel Discography (Eyeball Productions, 2014). The field has no need for any additional contribution from me.
What is the stylistic scope of Gloryland Jubilee? Here are the categories that I have sought to include:
The chronological scope given on the home page is "1943-1969", but that is intended only to convey a general time period. 1943 is the customary starting point for "post-war" discographies due to the recording ban, shellac shortage, etc. I do not need to go back any further than that since Tony Russell's Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921-1942 (Oxford University Press, 2004) does a splendid job of covering the "pre-war" period. 1969 is a convenient and memorable ending point, but I have not enforced it rigidly. In fact, my real goal is to be comprehensive in coverage from 1943 to 1969, but I happily include interesting records into the mid-1970s. Admittedly, I am pickier about later LPs than 45s/EPs for the simple reason that a mind-boggling number of gospel LPs were issued in the 1970s and it would be madness to try to catalog them all.
GJ includes all speeds and formats of singles, EPs, and LPs except transcripion discs.
Users of Rockin' Country Style will note many similarities between the two websites. While GJ was based on the RCS infrastructure and code, I have introduced a few changes along the way, some reflecting differences in the subject matter and some because starting with a clean slate made it possible to experiment without disrupting access to a public site. (Watchful RCS users may notice that some features developed for and tested on GJ have already been rolled out to RCS over the past year.)
More than two hundred artists appear in both RCS and GJ. Their artist pages include cross-reference links.
Private labels might be more prevalent in the sacred/gospel field than in any other. It was standard practice for a local group to make custom records to offer on the radio or at personal appearances. GJ includes almost a thousand such discs on hundreds of different labels. They fall into several categories. Here are my rules for dealing with the various types:
While I believe that Gloryland Jubilee is useful in its present state, I recognize that it is not (and never will be) complete. I intend to update it regularly with new information, images, and song samples.
Terry Gordon
March 2020
Compilation & presentation ©, Terry E. Gordon | This page revised on 6/30/2020 |
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