Nashboro Records

Nashboro Records was an American gospel label principally active in the 1950s and 1960s.

Nashboro was founded in Nashville, Tennessee by Ernie Lafayette Young (1892-1977), who was the owner of a record store, Ernie's Record Mart, and sponsor of a weekly hit parade show on radio station WLAC. In 1951, Young founded Nashboro to issue gospel records, and the following year also created Excello Records to release secular music, especially R&B and blues acts.^[1]

Nashboro became a prolific issuer of Southern gospel groups, and Young frequently signed gospel acts from competing labels after they had folded. Some of the groups were backed by the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section in the studio.^[1]

Young died in 1977, by which time Nashboro was increasingly reissuing out of its back catalogue rather than issuing new material. The label's catalogue was sold to AVI Entertainment in 1979,^[2] MCA Records in 2000, and Hip-O shortly thereafter.^[1] Relatively little of it has seen reissue, though in 2014 Tompkins Square Records released a four-CD compilation of Nashboro artists.^[3]

Artists

• The Angelic Gospel Singers
• The Barrett Sisters
• The Famous Boyer Brothers
• Alex Bradford
• J. Robert Bradley
• Brother Joe May
• Dorothy Love Coates
• The Consolers
• Edna Gallmon Cooke
• The Dixie Nightingales
• The Fairfield Four
• Five Singing Stars
• The Gospel Harmonettes
• Bessie Griffin
• Pilgrim Jubilees
• The Radio Four
• Cleophus Robinson
• Silvertone Singers of Cincinnati
• Roscoe Shelton
• The Skylarks
• Gloria Spencer
• Candi Staton
• Slim & the Supreme Angels
• The Swanee Quintet
• Willie Neal Johnson & The Gospel Keynotes
• Marvin Yancy
• Sister Lucille Pope & the Pearly Gates

References