A $190,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities will support the ULS's work to preserve and share the Charles and Frankie Pace Collection, one of the earliest archives of modern Black gospel music.
The collection consists mostly of printing plates that Pace used to publish his own music—some of the earliest modern Black gospel music. From their home base in Pittsburgh, Pace and his wife built a nationwide distribution network of Black-owned stores that fueled gospel’s rise in the 1940s and 1950s, but almost none of his own music was preserved or recorded. Most of it survived only on the plates. The library co-sponsored the first Pace concert in over sixty years in 2023 and, this summer, made studio recordings of six additional songs with local professionals.
This grant supports our work, along with partners from Seton Hill University, to create a critical edition of Pace’s complete songs—more than 200 in all.
We look forward to supporting performances and recordings by professional ensembles and school, community, and church choirs.
