Michael Robertson grew up singing church songs out of hymn books—classics like “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior” and “Lord, I Want to Be a Christian.” He attended Methodist and Baptist churches where music wasn’t known for extravagance, and choirs weren’t allowed to move, clap, or jump. But in 1965, he experienced something transformative. A now-bygone Houston gospel quartet, the Echoes of Zion, was singing in an old storefront-turned-church in his Fifth Ward neighborhood.
“It was the sound and the energy that I noticed,” says Robertson, who went on to be a lead singer in the group Endurance of Houston. “You can hear these beautiful voices, the guitars and the drums, and it was call and response—‘Oh, Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn.’”
Black gospel has influenced American culture as a tool of community building and political movements, and as a salve for oppression. But without a comprehensive effort to archive gospel, the genre’s history was at risk of disappearing. To preserve Black gospel traditions, Baylor University launched a massive effort to archive the art form in 2006.
Called the Black Gospel Music Preservation Program, the 16-year undertaking has led to the digitization of thousands of vinyl records—45s and 78s rescued from basements, attics, and landfills. A companion project, the Black Gospel Preachers Project, is archiving preachers’ sermons from VHS tapes, which are especially vulnerable to degradation.
The archive project was spearheaded by Robert Darden, Baylor University journalism, public relations, and new media professor emeritus, in conjunction with Baylor’s libraries. A longtime gospel music writer for Billboard magazine and author of several gospel books, Darden grew concerned when he struggled to find examples of gospel from the genre’s Golden Age, 1945 to 1975. He estimated two-thirds of those records were no longer accessible by the public—a fact that angered him so much that he wrote a “self-righteous editorial,” he says.
The op-ed, titled “Gospel’s Got the Blues,” appeared in The New York Times in 2005 following that year’s Grammy Awards. Soon, Darden started hearing from people who wanted to help right the wrong: A Connecticut businessman chipped in $350,000 to help launch the project; and Chicago-based gospel enthusiast Robert Marovich lent thousands of records from his personal collection. More records followed, some arriving literally in pieces. One record dated to 1912.
“American record companies aren’t too hip on diving too deep into their catalog to reissue the songs,” Marovich says. “Some of these songs may never be heard if somebody doesn’t at least try to preserve them.”
Visitors to Baylor can don headphones and browse the collection at the physical archive in the basement of the Moody and Jones Libraries. Or, the public can access the database online and listen to thousands of old records widely available for the first time. The program has also partnered with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. The museum features songs from the Baylor archive, including “Old Ship of Zion” by The Mighty Wonders, in its permanent collection.
Stephen Newby, a professor of music at Baylor who has assisted in leading the program since 2023, has plans to further involve the community in the project next year through in-person events centered on singing the archival hymns. “There is no better way to learn about this music than to listen to it and sing it and be present in the community,” says Newby, the first Lev H. Prichard III Endowed Chair in the Study of Black Worship. “The music was never designed to just sit on the shelf. It’s supposed to sit in the hearts and souls of humanity.”
Within each recorded gospel song, amid fuzzy scratches and pops, lies a story of the Black church and of hope. Most records contain what historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. often describes as the “double-voicedness” common in African American spirituals—a message within a message intended for Black listeners, Darden says. On some of the old records’ B-sides, there are examples of overt political messages, like gathering locations for the Civil Rights Movement.
“For us in the Black community, gospel music is a symbol of hope,” says Robertson, the Houston gospel singer. “There was so much Black people had to go through in those days, in the ’50s and ’60s,
and we went to church to hear a good uplifting gospel song that gave us hope that things were going to get better.”
While gospel music fans will certainly enjoy listening to these recently unearthed songs, secular music fans can find the roots of music they love, too. For example, listen to 1954’s “It Must Be Jesus” by The Southern Tones and hear the unmistakable hook of Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman,” which he recorded later that year, undoubtedly inspired by the religious tune.
“Black spirituals are at the heart of all American pop music, and as we now know, country music,” Darden says, noting that most of the music originated outside Texas.
Though Waco was home to Word Records Company, a prominent white gospel label, Texas’ recordings of Black gospel never reached the volume of cities such as Philadelphia and Chicago, Darden says. Houston-based Duke and Peacock record labels launched in 1949 and would include gospel recordings by now-legendary singers like Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, and Memphis Slim. But “Chicago has always been the leader for gospel music,” Robertson says. “You had Albertina Walker, Bessie Griffin, Thomas Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson—all of these people spent time in the Chicago area. When we heard these groups, the [church] robes came off, the hymn books got left in the choir room.”
That energy that Robertson found so transformative to his experience with gospel has carried into his gospel group Endurance, which doesn’t shy away from movement at its live performances. He says he sometimes dusts off the old tunes as well—they transport him back to a place of hope and comfort.
“There’s always a message in gospel music, and the message is supposed to be able to lift burdens, to prop a person up when they’re leaning, to give them hope,” Robertson says. “The music now is just supposed to make you feel good. The old music, it changed lives, it made people feel like fighting and hanging in there.”
