2008

SG History 101 - James D. Vaughn

This month, I want to take a closer look at the man who is considered by most people familiar with gospel music as the “father of southern gospel music”.

James David Vaughan was born December 14, 1864 in Giles County, Tennessee. Music was an integral part of his life from the outset, as was church. He was motivated from very early in life to the concept of sharing the gospel through song.

As a teenager, he attended a singing school and quickly assimilated the concepts and rudiments of shape note singing. By the time he was eighteen, he was teaching singing classes himself, and in a short time he started a male quartet composed of his three younger brothers and himself to publicize his school and his teaching, a portend of what was to come in the succeeding years.

Vaughan married a Tennessee girl, Jennie Freeman, in 1890, and suddenly decided to relocate to Cisco, Texas, a rural town in the central part of the state. Vaughan had an uncle there who was a Methodist minister, and who more than likely encouraged young James to begin a teaching career there. It wasn’t long afterward that most of James’ family, including his parents and his brothers John and Charles, likewise moved to Cisco.

Vaughan not only began teaching public school, he continued to offer friends and neighbors alike the opportunity to learn music through shape-note singing schools. By 1892, he met up with Ephraim Hildebrand, who operated a Virginia music publishing company, and also taught advanced normal schools along with traditional singing schools. Through the connection with Hildebrand, Vaughan became even more interested in music as a career than before. Hildebrand convinced Vaughan to compose gospel songs of his own. This proved to be a fortuitous move for Vaughan, who by 1896 was a published writer in “Crowning Day #2, a shaped-note gospel song collection.

It was tragedy, though, that prompted the next big move in Vaughan’s life. A tornado devastated Cisco, and Vaughan took his young and growing family back to Giles County, Tennessee, where James became a school principal there.

Vaughan by this time was firmly committed to making music his life’s calling, and in 1901 left his school principal job to relocate to Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. By this time he had already published his first independent song sollection, named “Gospel Chimes” after one of the original Vaughan compositions in the book.

It was here that Vaughan began the James D. Vaughan Music Company to market and publish songbooks of his own. Because of Vaughan’s contacts in the world of shape note publishing and his growing singing school teaching career, he was able to get a foothold in the songbook publishing business, and he was well on his way toward becoming a success in the gospel singing world.

And it was in 1910 that Vaughan made the most significant business decision of his life. He organized a male quartet that year to travel throughout the area to sing for anyone who would listen. The quartet’s repertoire consisted exclusively of songs in Vaughan’s songbooks, and sold 5,000 songbooks to a crowd of 1,500 at the quartet’s first official concert engagement at the Cumberland Presbyterian Assembly in Dickson, Tennessee.

This innovative concept is generally recognized as the beginning of professional gospel singing. For the first time, people organized to sing songs of praise to God, and they received renumeration for their efforts. Vaughan realized what a valuable tool that the singers he employed were to his business, and like any good businessman, he began expanding on his good idea, and soon his concept took on a reality all its own.

Within just a few years, Vaughan had as many as 16 quartets on his payroll, and due to the burgeoning automobile industry, was able to sponsor trips for his singers to states as far away from Tennessee as Illinois.

But Vaughan saw his business as a ministry as well, though his work predated the reference to musical ministries by a good 50 years (at least). Vaughan was a faithful and devoted Christian man, and in addition to his songbook and quartet ventures, he started a subscription newsletter known as the Vaughan Family Visitor. The publication offered spiritual advice along with advertisements about Vaughan’s songbooks and quartet appearances. Besides being a way to keep in touch with his customers, Vaughan’s music and spiritual life journal had the greatest circulation of any such publication of its type, and lasted into the late 1960s.

And Vaughan was able to keep up with the changes the modern age brought. In 1922, he established the first radio station licensed in Tennessee. WOAN’s signal reached into Canada at night with Vaughan’s quartets and other musicians performing his music, and advertising his publishing company and all the activities spawning from it. WOAN and the Visitor made James D. Vaughan and his publishing company a household name in the Southeastern United States during the 1920s.

Vaughan also tried his hand at the fledgling record industry with the Vaughan Phonograph Company in 1921, but neither the record company nor radio(Vaughan sold WOAN in 1929 after it began to lose money)ever afforded him the success that his songbooks and his gospel quartets did. Regardless, Vaughan’s understanding of the role radio and records would play in the establishment of his business was nothing short of visionary.

For a while, it seemed than Vaughan could do no wrong. His personal popularity from his publishing company, radio station, record company, and quartets was such that from 1923 to 1927, he was even mayor of Lawrenceburg.

Early Vaughan quartets didn’t look at their careers as vehicles for personal fame or recognition. It was understood from the outset that their job was primarily to sell the Vaughan songbooks. Consequently, there was a high turnover in personnel in those days, with singers going in and out of quartets regularly, often becoming teachers at Vaughan sponsored music schools.

It would follow that in subsequent years, with radio and personal appearance exposure, that individual singers in those groups would attract attention. Among the singers that became well-known through the Vaughan organization include Palmer Wheeler, Jim Waites, Odis Echols, and the earliest incarnations of the LeFevres, the Speer Family, and the John Daniel Quartet.

Another gospel music legend, V.O. Stamps, first became well-known while working in the Vaughan organization before leaving it in the 1924 to start the highly successful music company that bears his name.

Eventually, the growing affluence of the entire United States following World War II…and the success of gospel quartets that became well-known on their own through radio and records took gospel music out of the hands of publishing companies and put it in the hands of its’ writers and artists. And because of this, companies like the Vaughan publishing company and the Stamps-Baxter company faded from prominence and influence in the gospel music world.

But no one should ever forget that James David Vaughan was there first…with the first quartets that sang gospel music professionally, the first record company to issue gospel music records, and the first radio station in the country to feature gospel music on a regular basis.

Vaughan’s foresight in incorporating new developments and techniques and applying them to the spreading of gospel music as a distinct American art form can still be emulated today, and in fact was by successors as V.O. Stamps, Hovie Lister, and JD Sumner.

And certainly his willingness to acquire, encourage, and develop talented people in the field is appreciated and revered today as well.

Vaughan died in Lawrenceburg on February 9, 1941 at the age of 76. He has been honored with numerous memorials there, including the Vaughan Memorial Nazarene Church and the James D. Vaughan Museum.  The Gospel Music Association inducted Vaughan into its Hall of Fame in 1972. And the Southern Gospel Music Association did the same in 1997.

And since it was the rise of gospel quartets that established southern gospel music as a distinct music genre, it could fairly be said that if someone is a fan of southern gospel music, he or she owes James D. Vaughan a huge debt of thanks. It would not have come into being if not for his pioneering work.