The accolades to Aretha Franklin in numerous obituaries and tributes made note of her early years singing in her 
father’s church. Ms. Franklin was possibly the most famous of many popular artists who learned their craft in church: Little Richard, The Staple Singers, Sam Cooke and hundreds – literally, hundreds – more. The conflict between the sacred and the secular, has been an undercurrent of many careers. Performers whose formative years were rooted in the black church carried the craft learned there to a wider audience but with a twinge of guilt for taking god’s music and making it profane.
Unfortunately, much of this roots music is lost forever, recorded on vinyl and tape and never digitized.
Robert Darden is on a mission. Darden, a professor of journalism and public relations at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, is the director of the university’s Black Gospel Music Restoration Project. Darden initiated this project to “collect, digitize, and archive” all of the recordings available from “gospel’s golden age,” which he defines as the period from 1945 to 1975. Baylor, founded by Baptists in 1845, is an appropriate home for the project.
[Darden has no known connection with Baylor’s recently departed president and mentor to Brett Kavanaugh, Ken Starr.]
Professor Darden’s two-volume history, Nothing But Love in God’s Water traces gospel music from the time of slavery through the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s to the present. Darden estimates that 75 percent of recorded gospel music has been lost forever. In 2005, the New York Times published an essay by Darden bemoaning the disappearance of the music and calling for an effort to save the remaining. A wealthy New Yorker who read Darden’s plea put up the money to fund the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project.
The Digitization Lab resides in the basement of a Baylor library. There, discovered vinyl treasures are cleaned on a special machine, then digitized. Images are made of the actual records and stored with the digital music file. In an interview, Robert Darden said, “We see it as kind of like those seed banks up around the Arctic Circle that keep one copy of every kind of seed there is in case there’s another Dutch elm disease. I just want to make sure that every gospel song, the music that all American music comes from, is saved.”
The Oxford American magazine recently published a profile of Robert Darden and his near obsession with saving Gospel Music. Read it here.
