“It meant that he literally spread the good news, via music, from coast to coast. “He’s one of the early evangelists of gospel music,” said Kimberly Ellis, an American historian and founding executive director of the Historic Hill Institute, who is currently working on an oral history project on Frankie Pace. They also had a consistent list of more than 2510 mail subscribers who ordered from him directly. “I really didn’t realize until I was much older how talented my father was,” said Pace Barnes, who grew up working in his store.įrankie and Charles were also able to build a wide-ranging geographical distribution network of 301 stores across 29 different states. They helped establish gospel music across the city, performing at churches and events throughout Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania as well as weekly on the radio. The couple formed the Pace Choral Union, a gospel choir of 75 singers at its inception and 200 at its peak. Soon after meeting his wife, the couple relocated on Pittsburgh’s North Side where Pace introduced gospel music in 1936 to Tabernacle Baptist Church as the music director and later opened their store in the Hill District. He also formed the Pace Jubilee Singers, which was one of the first Black groups to record gospel music and perform on the radio. Pace got his start in Chicago, creating his first publishing company where he worked on the early music of Dorsey. Lynch says an important part of the archival work is restoring the true history and giving credit where credit is due since many of Pace’s most recorded songs, including, “If I Be Lifted Up,” are rarely credited to him, listed instead as “traditional songs.” “Charles Pace was a tremendous figure in music history.”ĭuring this period, African American gospel music composers didn’t have access to large publishing companies so Pace learned to do it all himself. “This is something that we can, as Pittsburghers, all be proud of,” said Lynch with a smile. It was the curiosity of music historian Christopher Lynch that set the Charles Henry Pace preservation project into motion. Today, the University of Pittsburgh is restoring his work from the 1920s to the 1950s and cementing his place in the genre’s history. “I didn’t know it was going to be a legacy,” said Pace Barnes.Īs it turns out, her father was one of the first African American gospel music composers in the United States, and the owner of one of the country’s first independent, Black gospel music publishing companies. But she was not expecting those decaying printing plates and papers to reveal an important part of gospel music history. PITTSBURGH (AP) - Scattered in crates, dirty and difficult to read, the gospel music of composer Charles Henry Pace sat packed away, unorganized - and unrealized - for more than 20 years.įrances Pace Barnes, the pioneering music publisher’s daughter who remembers how he could turn a hum into a song, knew the crates held pieces of her family’s past.
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