Pace Jubilee Singers to be Inducted to the Gennett Walk of Fame

On Saturday, September 11, 2010, the Pace Jubilee Singers (right) will be honored with a medallion on Gennett’s celebrated Walk of Fame in Richmond, Indiana.

The medallion recognizes the contribution the Pace Jubilee Singers, Gennett Records recording artists, made to American music.

In the mid 1920s, noted musician, songwriter, arranger and publisher Charles Henry Pace organized the Pace Jubilee Singers from members of the senior choir at Beth Eden Baptist Church in Chicago’s fashionable Morgan Park neighborhood (then a suburb). The group, anchored by the lead vocals of locally popular gospel singer Hattie Parker, became the city’s most recorded African American sacred group. Between 1926 and 1929, the Pace Jubilee Singers released more than 70 sides for various labels, including the Gennett imprint of Richmond, Indiana.

The Pace Jubilee Singers were also among the first African American groups to perform on radio and yo record selections by gospel hymnist C.A. Tindley.

Their performances integrated the jubilee style popular at the time with bluesy scoops and runs associated with the sanctified church and the emerging gospel music of Thomas A. Dorsey.

After the Pace Jubilee Singers disbanded, Hattie Parker worked closely with Prince Johnson, whose Johnson Gospel Singers featured a young New Orleans migrant, Mahalia Jackson. Parker and Jackson would have most certainly known each other, and it is even possible Jackson picked up a vocal tip or two from the elder singer.

Pace later moved to Pittsburgh, where he reestablished his Old Ship of Zion publishing company and organized the Pace Choral Union, a prototype community gospel choir.

Pace’s daughter Frances Pace Barnes and TBGB’s Bob Marovich will be present in Richmond this weekend to represent the Pace Jubilee Singers on this special occasion.

Many thanks to Beth Fosler, executive director Terri Hardy and the directors of the Starr-Gennett Foundation for making this wonderful and much-deserved tribute possible.

Read more here: Gennett Walk of Fame and at http://www.starrgennett.org/.

Pace Jubilee Singers photo from the Robert Marovich Collection of Black Gospel Music. Walk of Fame image courtesy of the Starr-Gennett Foundation.