How Waco, Texas, Became the Unlikely Center for the Study of Black Gospel Music

 Engineer Kyle Felkins begins the digitization process on a rare gospel LP in the Digitization Booth in the Black Gospel Music Preservation Program at Baylor University. Photo ©Travis Taylor, Black Gospel Archive

By Robert F. Darden

Growing up as a military brat, gospel music provided the soundtrack of my life. As a young man, I became gospel music editor for the “bible” of the recorded music industry, Billboard magazine, and interviewed many of the legends of gospel. Eventually, I became a professor at Baylor University and in early 2005 saw the publication of my book, “People Get Ready, A New History of Black Gospel Music.” But instead of elation, I felt dismay. 

Much of the music I wrote about – the foundational music of most American music forms – was simply unavailable. The vinyl from gospel music’s “Golden Age” (roughly 1945 to 1975) was tied up in corporate takeovers or litigation, lost in the vaults of international corporations, or simply moldering in landfills or attics. 

In response, I wrote an angry op-ed piece and submitted it to The New York Times. The Times’ editorial page receives hundreds of such unsolicited submissions each week. But my thesis was that if modern music lovers allow Black gospel music to disappear, future generations are going to be appalled. The essay struck a chord with The Times’ editors, and “Gospel’s Got the Blues,” appeared in the Feb. 15, 2005, edition of the newspaper.

The following morning, a New York businessman, Charles M. Royce, called me in my office in the Journalism, Public Relations & New Media Department at Baylor. Royce told me that if I could determine how to preserve the music, he would finance the preservation.

I immediately met Interim Dean of Baylor University Libraries, William Hair, and digital librarians Tim Logan and Darryl Stuhr. The three agreed with me that this was a rare opportunity to create an essential – and lasting – legacy. Logan and Stuhr, soon joined by other librarians and engineers, with the support of the new Dean of Libraries Patti Orr, spent months researching existing efforts (and duplication processes) to preserve vinyl and creating the blueprints for a state-of-the-art digitization center. The new venture was dubbed the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project (BGMRP).

In late 2005, we presented the proposal, which included salaries for an engineer and meta-data librarian, to Royce. Royce approved our approach and sent Baylor University four $80,000 checks over a period of several months.

Construction on the BGMRP studio began in 2006. The studio was housed in several locations in Baylor’s Moody Library before being assigned a permanent home in the library’s Garden Level. Under Stuhr and Logan’s leadership, the libraries began creating an archival quality cataloging system for the music. The BGMRP began digitizing its first LPs and 45s, drawn primarily from my extensive personal collection, in 2007.

Two events jump-started the collection process. First, word of the BGMRP’s efforts reached Terry Gross, host of NPR’s popular “Fresh Air” program. My appearance on “Fresh Air” on Dec. 20, 2007, resulted in many collectors, large and small, donating (or loaning) their gospel music collections to the BGMRP.

Engineers Hannah Engstrom checks the online catalog while Stephen Bolech plays a gospel LP on the Listening Booth turntable in the Black Gospel Archive addition to the Black Gospel Music Preservation Program. An unidentified student (left) browses the collection. Photo ©Travis Taylor, Black Gospel Archive

About the same time, Robert Marovich, a gospel music historian/collector from Chicago, began loaning the BGMRP 50 albums a month from his collection – believed to be the largest in the United States. 

When Royce’s initial gift ended, Orr spent several years incorporating the BGMRP’s work into the Baylor Library system, slowly making the digitization and scanning systems invaluable to the university at large and expanding its personnel, equipment and services.

To further publicize the growing collection, particularly to gospel music scholars, Orr worked with donor Ella Prichard to create of an annual symposium dedicated to Black gospel music – the Pruit Symposium – at Baylor. Sponsored by the Prichard Foundation, the symposia immediately attracted the top scholars in the field for sessions that often included spirited musical performances. Due to Prichard’s generosity, the Pruit Symposium’s popular performances were free to the public and drew large crowds from across the state to venues that included both Baylor auditoriums and African American churches in Waco.

At each symposium, the collections of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Program were promoted, analyzed, and incorporated. 

One early Pruit Symposium presenter, Dr. Dwandalyn Reese, of the then in-progress National Museum of African American History & Culture, worked with us to provide the gospel music for the new museum in Washington D.C.

When Jeffry Archer, the new dean of libraries, arrived in 2020, he immediately saw that the increased use of the BGMRP and its studios by music scholars, the university, academic classes and even a growing number of gospel music fans was placing a strain on the engineers and staff. The effort was renamed the Black Gospel Music Preservation Program (BGMPP) to emphasize its multiple areas of emphasis. A new, more user-friendly storage and presentation area – the Black Gospel Archives (BGA) – doubled the space of the BGMPP. Almost immediately, groups began scheduling tours and conferences utilizing the new space.

The increased space has enabled the scope of the program to expand to include recordings by African American preachers, as well as additional photographs, posters, songbooks and other ephemera. In 2023, collector and author Opal Louis Nations gave his massive collection to the BGMPP and BGA. 

Through the years, the BGMPP has been featured on multiple programs on NPR (including “Morning Edition,” “1A,” “All Things Considered” and others), the BBC, CBC, and radio networks in Ireland, Australia and Austria, as well as dozens of national magazines and newspapers. It was also featured in two recent music documentaries on PBS hosted by Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Black Church” and “Gospel!” Portions of “Gospel!” were filmed in the BGMPP.

I retired from Baylor in May 2023 and after a year-long search, Dr. Stephen Newby was selected as the Lev H. Prichard III Endowed Chair in the Study of Black Worship and Professor of Music, with the promotion and advancement of the BGMPP/BGA as his primary focus. In March 2025, our collaboration “Soon & Very Soon: The Transformative Music and Ministry of Andrae Crouch” was published by Oxford University Press.

Under Newby’s leadership, the BGMPP/BGA, working with the Baylor Libraries, applied for and received a $2.4 million grant from the Lilly Foundation to further expand space and provide the BGMPP with additional outreach programs and activities.

As of April 2025, the BGMPP/GMA has digitized more than 60,000 gospel music recordings (and related items), making it the largest such publicly available collection in the world. In the process, as we had dared to hope nearly 20 years ago, it has become a major center for the research and study of Black gospel music, with scholars from across the world visiting the collection either in person or via online access.

I’m still a little awestruck how this thing unfolded and continues to unfold. But I’m grateful every day that through a single letter, the generosity of a man none of us have ever met, the persistence and hard work of a host of librarians and audio engineers, and the gifts of other “angels,” the astonishing success of the Black Gospel Music Preservation Program and the Black Gospel Archives means that good ol’ gospel music will forever be around to inspire, uplift and enchant future generations. 

————————————————————————————————————————-

Robert Darden is professor emeritus in Journalism at Baylor University and a member of the Overby Center panel of experts.