Nashboro Records was an American

gospel Gospel originally meant the Christianity, Christian message ("the gospel"), but in the second century Anno domino, AD the term (, from which the English word originated as a calque) came to be used also for the books in which the message w ...

label principally active in the 1950s and 1960s.

History

Nashboro was founded in

Nashville Nashville, often known as Music City, is the capital and List of municipalities in Tennessee, most populous city in the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is the county seat, seat of Davidson County, Tennessee, Davidson County in Middle Tennessee, locat ...

Tennessee Tennessee (, ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders Kentucky to the north, Virginia to the northeast, North Carolina t ...

by Ernie Lafayette Young (1892-1977), who was the owner of a record store, Ernie's Record Mart, and sponsor of a weekly hit parade show on radio station

WLAC WLAC (1510 AM broadcasting, AM) is a commercial radio, commercial radio station in Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America. Owned by iHeartMedia, it broadcasts a talk radio radio format, format. The radio studio, studios are in Nashvill ...

. In 1951, Young founded Nashboro to issue gospel records, and the following year also created

Excello Records Excello Records was an American blues independent record label, started by Ernie Young in Nashville, Tennessee, United States, in 1953 as a subsidiary of Nashboro, a gospel label. History It recorded such artists as Louis Brooks, Lightnin' Slim, ...

to release secular music, especially R&B and blues acts.Robert Darden, "Nashboro Records". W.K. McNeil, ed. ''Encyclopedia of American Gospel Music''. Routledge, 2013, pp. 270-271. Nashboro became a prolific issuer of Southern gospel groups, and Young frequently signed gospel acts from competing labels after they had folded. Some of the groups were backed by the

Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section The Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section is a group of American session musicians based in the northern Alabama town of Muscle Shoals. One of the most prominent American studio house bands from the 1960s to the 1980s, these musicians, individually or a ...

in the studio. Young died in 1977, by which time Nashboro was increasingly reissuing out of its back catalogue rather than issuing new material. The label's catalogue was sold to AVI Entertainment in 1994,

MCA Records MCA Records was an American record label owned by MCA Inc. established in 1972, though MCA had released recordings under that name in the UK from the 1960s. The label achieved success in the 1970s through the 1980s, often by acquiring other ...

in 1997, and Hip-O shortly thereafter. Relatively little of it has seen reissue, though in December 2013 Tompkins Square Records released a 4-CD compilation of Nashboro artists titled ''I HEARD THE ANGELS SINGING: Electrifying Black Gospel from the Nashboro Label, 1951-1983'' (894807002981). Nashboro was one of several labels to have its catalog of master recordings destroyed in the

2008 Universal fire On June 1, 2008, a fire broke out on the backlot of Universal Studios Hollywood, an American film studio and theme park in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles County, California. The fire began when a worker used a blowtorch to warm aspha ...

Artists

* The Angelic Gospel Singers * The Barrett Sisters * The Famous Boyer Brothers * Alex Bradford * J. Robert Bradley *

Brother Joe May Brother Joe May (November 9, 1912 – July 14, 1972) was an American gospel singer. He was sometimes billed as "The Thunderbolt of the Middle West", and has been described as "arguably the greatest male soloist in the history of gospel music. ...

* Dorothy Love Coates * The Consolers * Edna Gallmon Cooke * The Crescendos (" Oh Julie") *

The Dixie Nightingales The Dixie Nightingales, also known as Ollie & the Nightingales and The Nightingales, was an African-American male vocal group, whose repertoire included gospel and later rhythm and blues and soul music. History The group, based in Memphis, Tenne ...

* Isaac Douglas * The Fairfield Four * Five Singing Stars * The Gospel HarmonettesThe Gospel Harmonettes disco
Retrieved 29 October 2021 * Bessie Griffin * Pilgrim Jubilees * The Radio Four *

Cleophus Robinson The Reverend Cleophus Robinson (March 18, 1932, Canton, MississippiJuly 2, 1998, Saint Louis, Missouri) was an American gospel singer and preacher. He hosted a gospel television series which ran for over 20 years. He was often referred to as "The ...

* Silvertone Singers of Cincinnati * Roscoe Shelton * The Skylarks * The Jewell Gospel Singers * Gloria Spencer * Earlston Ford *

Candi Staton Canzetta Maria "Candi" Staton (, ) (born March 13, 1940) is an American singer–songwriter, best known in the United States for her 1970 cover of Tammy Wynette's " Stand by Your Man" and her 1976 disco chart-topper " Young Hearts Run Free". In E ...

* Slim & the Supreme Angels * The Swanee Quintet *Sister Emma Tucker * Willie Neal Johnson & The Gospel Keynotes * Marvin Yancy * Sister Lucille Pope & the Pearly Gates *The Bright Stars *Oscar Bishop

History

Artists

References

See also