Sunday Morning Gospel, after 11 pm. (Well, I had the best intentions.) Ten-inch Singspiration goodness.

 

A late-evening Sunday Morning Gospel for you--some really marvelous 1953 material, performed in that expert Back to the Bible Broadcast style I love beyond words.  Some may regard the Back to the... music as too conventional, or too MOR, but I admire the sheer expertise of the performances.  Polished but heartfelt.  The sound is super, and I eliminated all of the surface crackle, which was about typical for a sacred ten-incher--lots of nicks, crosscuts, needle-drop evidence, etc.  Those good ol' one-pound tonearms, I guess.  My brother and I had a four-speed portable phonograph, and most of the time any attempt to cue the stylus to another part of the record resulted in a nick, or worse.

Then came lightweight tonearms, anti-skating, and suddenly it became possible to accidently knock the needle across an entire side, from the first groove to the last--with no ill results.  Anyway, I gave myself credit for eliminating the crackle, pop, etc., but most of the credit really goes to the astoundingly effective VinylStudio declicker, which took out most (but not all) of the unwanted noise.  The rest, I manually removed, as usual, in MAGIX.  But what a before-and-after example!  I should have ripped a "raw" portion just so you could hear it.

A Diane gift, and yes, the previous owner had played it quite often on a totally not-modern turntable, but again, I would call the condition about average for a 10-incher loved by the previous owner.  Buster would be more of an authority on that.

How do I know it's from 1953?  Easy--this is an RCA custom pressing, and the E3 in the matrix number tells us 1953.  Otherwise, I would have guesstimated 1955 for this, and I would have been two years off.  Now, here's the weird thing--and the reason this post is so late.  I had an allergic reaction to the musty jacket, and I didn't realize it until about two hours into the weird experience.  I felt shortness of breath, my head was woozy, and I was almost afraid to go downstairs, in case I fell or something.  (I didn't.)  I managed to open the window to air the room out (thank goodness for a seasonal fall day, for a change) and I booked out of here.  And the mystery is, why now?  That is, after all my years of encountering musty jackets and labels, all the years of flea-marketing and Goodwilling in germ-filled environments, why did my system suddenly decide to freak out?  It's had countless opportunities to date.

At any rate, two Benadryls, two asthma inhaler puffs, and some sitting down and resting, and all I have now is a headache and a slightly queasy stomach.  I was so wired, I wanted to simply stay on my feet and obsessively self-dx myself, but I didn't want to fall, so I talked myself into parking my keister on my Monster chair (I think that's the actual name).  When we're in a medical panic, logic doesn't rule the event.  Just when we need logic to guide us, that's when it flees the scene.

I goofed on my labeling--the second track should be the Chorus, not "Choir."  Oh, and there's a certain amount of irony in the fourth title--Singing of His Love, by Wendell Loveless.  Anyway, I'm sure that none of the mold spores in question got into the zip file, so open without fear.  And, again, just your regular, everyday musty jacket--so, why did my immune system go into semi-shock?  This must be one of those strange, one-off allergic reactions.  That, or I really ticked off the vinyl god.

DOWNLOAD  Back to the Bible Broadcast Chorus Quartet, 1953

I'm a Rollin, Walk in Jerusalem

What a Friend (Converse)

In the Secret Place of Prayer (Coleman)

Singing Along the Way (A.H. Ackley)/Singing of His Love (Wendell Loveless)

Amazing Grace, Only One Life

Take the World but Give Me Jesus (Sweney)

I Am With You (Morris-Harkness)

That Beautiful Name (Camp)

(Singspiration LP-107; 1953)

Lee