The colophon
What The Amen Corner is: a reader's tunebook of gospel music and the people who sing it across Florida and the Southeast, number by number.
The Amen Corner is a reader's tunebook of gospel music and the people who sing it across Florida and the Southeast. It keeps the gospel landscape the way an old singing-school book keeps its airs: part by part, number by number, every entry shaped, dated and set down so the whole singing stays readable.
What the book carries
Every number in the book is a dated note kept in one of four parts, and each part sings from its own shape, the way the old four-shape books taught the scale. The choir, the triangle part, covers mass choirs, directors and the rehearsal craft that holds forty voices together. The quartet, the circle part, follows the quartet tradition, family groups and the road they still run. The record, the square part, keeps the recordings, labels, producers and the shelves where the sound lives. The pews, the diamond part, stays with congregational song, choir lofts and the craft of singing church.
How a number is set down
Each note is written by the book's keeper and read a second time before it is entered. Names, dates and places are checked against the public record: library and archive holdings, label and session documentation, the interviews and oral histories that survive. What the book cannot confirm stays unsung, and the sources a note was sung from are named at its foot.
When the book is wrong
When a number turns out misheard, the correction runs with its own date. Nothing is quietly rewritten: a note that changes says so, the way a well-kept tunebook keeps its own amendments in the margin.
A note on the address
This tunebook occupies an address that once carried the site of a Tampa ministry: its pastor's biography, books, sermon tapes and choir recordings. That ministry, its people and its works are not ours and are not continued here. What we kept is the subject, gospel music and the communities that sing it, because that is the ground our readers walk.
Write to the circle
Corrections, memories and numbers the book should sing next are welcome at contact@atjonesministries.org. A message with a name, a church and a date gets read first.