Every day, 100s of Baylor students walk past an unassuming room, tucked into a corner of the University library…without knowing the treasures inside.
The Black Gospel Archive’s walls are packed from top to bottom with records and sheet music reflecting decades of music history.
"Baylor has the largest digital archive of black gospel music and preaching in the world," said Dr. Stephen Newby, research lead for the archive.
And it’s about to get bigger.
Newby and his team collect and digitize gospel music from the golden era, roughly the 1940s to the mid 70s.
In the center of the room, a small studio sits ready to turn any record into digital recording and be immortalized online.
When digitized, they sound like this:
With the Lilly Endowment’s grant, Newby said pieces of the archive will be able travel with him to conferences and concerts to bring more public awareness to the archive. They will also collect important oral histories.
"There are people still alive in their 80s and 90s that need to be interviewed," Neby said. "This is going to allow me to go to them and interview them and ask them questions about their churches, about gospel music."
He said that context is one thing the expansive archive is missing.
"This grant is going to allow us to do that work, to go to these spaces because the elderly, they’re not going to be able to get to Baylor, but we can get to them," Newby.
So how did this massive, historically significant collection get to a University in Waco? It’s the creation of former Baylor professor Robert Darden who founded the archive nearly two decades ago. Darden was a journalist and focused his career on gospel music.
"It is the music that endured and it helped the enslaved people endure," Darden said. "It is a music that helped the civil rights movement when there was only one out of ten churches in Birmingham on the side of Doctor King. When everyone was against them, this is the music that helped them."
That’s why creating an easily accessible digital archive is so important to him.
"That’s going to help us understand those who came before us," Darden said.
That’s something Archive director Stephen Newby saw first hand.
He grew up in Detroit in the sixties and seventies and remembers some of those key moments Darden talks about.
" I lived it out. So I see the gaps in the story," he said. "And this is going to allow me to take some time to fill some of those gaps."
Newby also plans to use some of the grant money to hold workshops with churches to teach them how to archive their own history, whether that be oral history with a church elder or records in the basement.
"And it is going to help build a bridge for the next generation of worshipers in these congregations, so they will better understand their church history," he said.
The Archive is home to about 50,000 digitized gospel records, but there’s no way to tell how many more are out there.
Newby says that the team will keep digitizing records as long as people keep sending them.
"How many times you gonna record Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies? They just keep recording it, right?," he said. "We’re going to keep digitizing this gospel music because it’s necessary."
The grant will also help expand the physical space of the archive, hire new full-time digitization staff and fund a four-year concert series. Details for the concerts are still in the works, but Newby says he’ll be focusing on Midwestern Gospel, starting in Chicago and Detroit.
You can listen to more songs from the Black Gospel Archive here.
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