The Los Angeles filmmaker Jim Ball, who died in 2022, was known for b-movies. 1964’s Fraternity of Horror, a low-budget black-and-white horror film that would make Wes Craven blush. Night of the Demon, the 1980 Sasquatchploitation movie, banned for a decade in the U.K. for its gruesome depictions of castration and disembowelment. A host of 1970s gay male erotic videos.
But Ball’s most important legacy, arguably, has nothing to do with the movie business. It’s a long-forgotten library of midcentury religious music he recorded in and for Los Angeles-based African American churches—recently rediscovered among piles of his old stuff, in a Winnetka, California garage.
It doesn’t seem church music fans ever got their hands on the libraries; hardly anyone outside a small circle of Ball’s friends knew that copies of the 40-album opus, the Saviour Home Record Library, ever existed. For this reason, the project, now set for digitization by Baylor University’s Black Gospel Archive and Listening Center, is a crucial artifact. It preserved the sound of Black sacred music in Los Angeles as it transitioned from Western European choral and congregational singing to more capacious repertories featuring newly composed gospel songs influenced by blues and jazz. Had Ball not captured the sound of these churches at that particular time, much of the aural history of this transition—which echoed national changes, as the Great Migration brought traditional Southern folk sounds to urban centers in the North and West—would likely be lost forever.
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Ball, a Texan who moved to Los Angeles in the late 1950s to study cinematography at USC, enjoyed using his reel-to-reel tape recorder to capture audio from “Great Churches of the Golden West,” a local television program that featured white congregations. Ball told musician and fellow USC student Carl Matthes about his unusual hobby, and Matthes thought immediately of his friend J. David Bowick, the choir director at Holman United Methodist, an African American church in L.A.’s West Adams district. Bowick wanted to convert a tape recording of his 120-voice choir performing Haydn’s Third Mass, with an orchestra, to vinyl. Ball pressed the record. At a time when African Americans were sometimes derided unfairly as being incapable of performing classical masterworks, Bowick was delighted to have a record of his church music ministry’s superb presentation of Haydn.
Ball and Matthes realized they might be onto something. They began knocking on doors of African American churches, many near the USC campus, to see if they, too, might want bespoke recordings of their choirs or small singing groups. The duo’s business model was simple: Churches paid a flat fee for 100 copies of a custom recording, including pressing, cover art, and final packaging. Ball engineered the recordings; Matthes typed up the album jackets and handled vocal arranging as needed. “Word of mouth got around that we were reliable, we were affordable, and we would turn out a decent product on time,” Matthes told me recently.
Had Ball not captured the sound of these churches at that particular time, much of the aural history of this transition—which echoed national changes, as the Great Migration brought traditional Southern folk sounds to urban centers in the North and West—would likely be lost forever.
Churches including Trinity Baptist, Pilgrim Baptist, Second Baptist, Friendship Baptist, and the First AME Church of Pasadena all contracted with Ball Records. Their recordings reveal a varied community in a moment of promise and change. L.A.’s Black churches developed as African Americans began flocking to the city after the Civil War. As in other urban centers, members of 19th-century Black churches in Los Angeles were driven by middle-class aspirations and stuck to the songbooks and stylings of their white middle-class denominational counterparts. Initially, at least, they rejected the spontaneous and effervescent music that drove Pentecostal worship services and eventually informed gospel music. Some Black churches’ artistic conservatism lasted well into the 20th century. You can hear it on Ball Records recordings.
Los Angeles’s Liberty Baptist Church’s 1968 Ball release Bells Over Jordan, subtitled “Music of the Christian Negro,” showcases 19th-century hymns like “Go Heralds of Salvation Forth,” and an array of sturdy anthems and classical choruses. Around 1963, Ball recorded Bowick’s Holman United Methodist choir singing an entire album of concert spirituals arranged by composer and choir director Hall Johnson. Also included in the Saviour library are spirituals by Black composers and arrangers Harry T. Burleigh, William L. Dawson, John Wesley Work III, and Jester Hairston.
Black sacred music in Los Angeles was already beginning to change, however, as more Southern migrants settled in Los Angeles after World War I. Their style of worship retained an informal, impassioned, and communal style with roots in West African traditions. Emotional reminders of the world they left behind helped transplanted Southerners adjust to the hustle and bustle of their new home. Gospel music, which came to L.A. via Chicago, set traditional hymns, revival songs, and newly-composed works to the bouncing beat of Black popular music, and best reflected the new style and sound.
But even as local pastors adopted the newfangled gospel music, many refused to completely forsake the formality of “respectable” church music. So, a number of the 1960s-era Ball recordings feature church choirs presenting a mix of tried-and-true hymn standards, anthems, and spirituals, as well as newer gospels. Releases by Victory Baptist, Friendship Baptist, and Sweet Home Baptist churches feature songs such as “Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody,” which blended formal training with gospel techniques such as vocal melisma, a Hammond organ mimicking human voices, and call-and-response singing between the lead singer and the choir.
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Several tracks recorded by Ball capture vocal and instrumental gospel talents in their ascendancy. These include “Fifth Beatle” Billy Preston, who makes the Hammond organ moan and shout on an album for the Church of Divine Guidance, and his equally gifted sister, vocalist Rodena Preston, who sings on a release from Pilgrim Baptist Church. Young future Motown recording artist Sondra “Blinky” Williams sings with closed-eyed abandon on the album by her father’s Friendship Baptist Church choir, and gospel luminary Thurston Frazier directs the Voices of Victory Baptist Church as they sing “I’m So Glad that Jesus Lifted Me” at full throttle.
Sometime in the mid-1960s, Ball anthologized 40 of his previously issued albums—mainly from Black churches but with a handful of white church artists included—and created the Saviour Home Record Library. Each library consisted of four cream-colored boxes that held 10 albums apiece; a fifth box contained a 120-page spiral-bound finding aid created by Matthes, organized alphabetically by song title, category, and topic.
Over time, Ball dropped his music projects to focus on movies; years later, he told Matthes he had stored the 68 complete copies of the Saviour Home Record Library in his garage. Then he told him the records had been stolen. It was only by a stroke of luck that Matthes, as executor of Ball’s estate, found the Saviour libraries in 2023. They were indeed in a garage—not Ball’s but another friend’s. None, Matthes believes, had ever been sold to listeners. Baylor University anticipates making the recordings available to the public for online listening as early as late May of this year. This 60-year-old time capsule of the sacred music of Los Angeles will be a treasure for the churches, their congregations and, most importantly, the family and friends of those featured on the recordings.
That a white producer of grisly films and erotic videos became an important producer of Black sacred music is not as strange as it seems. Ball fulfilled on shoestring budgets the entertainment demands of underserved audiences, ignored by major record companies and film studios. In the process, he provided a distinct sound print of African American church music in transition that will be accessible for generations to come.
Robert M. Marovich is editor-in-chief of “The Journal of Gospel Music,” a Grammy-nominated liner notes writer, and author of Peace Be Still: How James Cleveland and the Angelic Choir Created a Gospel Classic.
Primary editor: Eryn Brown | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard
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