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headlining gospel history WJBF television’s Parade of Quartets is the country’s longest-running gospel program, melding music with social and political news. UGA doctoral student Carrie Allen is helping prepare and archive the Augusta, Georgia, program’s tapes, which were donated in February 2008 to the UGA library. She’s an ethnomusicologist and musicologist, seeking to preserve and chronicle this unique musical and historic contribution.
BY CYNTHIA ADAMS PHOTOS BY NANCY EVELYN
permanent home at UGA. It’s an immense task that isn’t yet complete. The work of conserving and organizing the footage will continue after Allen puts the last touches on her dissertation. “The actual cataloguing and preservation of the donation won’t be complete until well after I’m gone,” she says. The work underway has become an artistic obsession for Allen.
How Music with Meaning and Purpose Changed Augusta Since 1955, Parade of Quartets has been a gospel program and a sociopolitical agent of change for the Augusta, Georgia, region. Today, the television program has a devoted advocate in doctoral student Carrie Allen. Allen, a classically trained musician and ethnomusicologist/musicologist, is engrossed by the analysis, documentation, logging, cataloguing and conservation of more than 400 hours of donated footage of the program’s televised black gospel performances. The collection contains rare footage of appearances by famous religious and political leaders. As a student worker in the media archives, Allen helps catalogue the collection—the most significant of its kind in any library—as it makes its
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It’s a Rainy Night in Georgia… nd dusk falls over Augusta as the air turns sodden and sour. Downtown bears the steady assault of thunder. Rain roils, and condensation hisses off the steaming-hot concrete. A few cars rumble down Reynolds Street past the low-slung WJBF-TV building, replete with retro yellow signage and a visible broadcasting tower. The famous—including James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke and Otis Redding—sometimes came here, loosened their pipes, and belted out gospel inside WJBF’s modest sound studio. Unbeknownst to the musicians streaming into the television station today, a force of another kind is gathering nearby. A tornado looms
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across the Savannah River, and the air is electrified with negative ions. The airways will soon be similarly charged, with a capella sounds, which will subsequently travel Sunday morning over the airwaves into 14,000 households. Not even the mildewy weather discourages the high-spirited Left Foot Spirituals gospel quartet as they enter the station and stamp their feet dry. Perhaps all those ions electrify them, as the animated quartet members assemble in the hallway outside the television studio, bearing instruments, amplifiers, and hangers of carefully coordinated clothing. Once in costume, the group will take to the stage and ignite it with verve and their signature spirited, leftfoot-leading, foot-stamping delivery. The singers are jittery with preperformance nerves. They joust and spar with one another while gathering themselves for a televised appearance. They eye each trouser seam to assure it is knife-sharp. “Your shirt’s crumpled,” one member accuses, pointing. “It won’t be,” the singer assures. “I brought an iron.” After all, the singers are poised on the brink of what is a breakthrough in their genre: an appearance on the nation’s longest