Vaughan's Family Visitor  1915-1986 Available on Microfilm Set of six reels of positive 35 mm. microfilm.  $225.00/set [sold as full sets only]

Vaughan's Family Visitor was the monthly publication of the James D. Vaughan music publishing company of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. Vaughan is considered by many to be the most important publisher of southern gospel music in the twentieth century. His magazine served as trade journal, newsletter, advertisement, and inspirational magazine to the singing community. The Visitor celebrated and documented the rich world of shape-note gospel music for almost seventy-five years.

Vaughan's publication of the Visitor was an outgrowth of his success as a publisher of gospel songbooks. Born in Giles County, Tennessee, in 1864, Vaughan relocated briefly to Texas before settling in Lawrenceburg in about 1893. In 1900 his first songbook, Gospel Chimes, was published and by 1910 Vaughan was selling 60,000 songbooks a year. He soon established annual music schools in Lawrenceburg at which he trained singing school teachers who were active across the south, teaching in community schools and churches. In 1912 he first published The Musical Visitor, which changed title to Vaughan's Family Visitor in the early 1920's.

The pages of Vaughan's Family Visitor contained information about the singing school movement, state and local singing conventions, songwriters and singers, publishers and editors, touring gospel quartets and their recording activities. It also reported on the emerging radio programs featuring gospel music. Readers of the Visitor were treated to details about singing styles and musical techniques, folk histories of the gospel song movement, historical notes about the Vaughan company itself. Songs, poems, sermons and even notes on etiquette filled the pages.

This microfilm edition of the Visitor makes available to researchers a majority of the monthly issues from Vol. 4 (1915) through Vol. 86 (1986). The Center for Popular Music assembled as complete a run of the Visitor as could be found, borrowing from several sources to piece together an incomplete but substantial collection. More than 600 issues span 70 years to document the evolution of gospel music in the south from a cottage industry to a thriving commercial art form.
 

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