Charles and Frankie Pace Collection
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This digital collection consists of items related to Charles Pace’s composition and publication of gospel music. These items include stock images, collages, and other materials that represent the first step in Pace’s printing process; negative photographs with which Pace made his printing plates; and sheet music. Since the negative photographs represent one stage of his creative process and often do not represent the final draft of his music, they have been left as negatives and not flipped to positive.
What’s in the entire collection?
The bulk of the collection consists of materials related to Pace’s printing process, but the collection also includes songbooks containing Pace’s music; business items such as letterhead, envelopes, and order forms; photographs; an invitation to a concert; and a few pieces of correspondence.
About Charles and Frankie Pace
Husband-and-wife team Charles and Frankie Pace ran one of the earliest and most successful independent Black gospel music publishing businesses, which they started in Chicago in 1934 and moved to Pittsburgh in 1936. Prior to working with Frankie, Charles worked as a pop song composer, arranger for Lillian M. Bowles’s Bowles Music House, and gospel-choir leader in Chicago. His Pace Jubilee Singers were the first group to record and perform many gospel classics on the radio.
Charles composed and arranged his own music, made his own printing plates, and printed his music himself. With Frankie, they operated a music store in the Hill District in Pittsburgh and distributed his music to a nationwide network of Black-owned stores. They also founded the Pace Gospel Choral Union, a group composed of hundreds of singers from Black churches throughout western Pennsylvania.
Gospel music was an important part of Frankie’s activism, and Frankie made space at the store for the offices of the Citizens Committee for Hill District Renewal and other organizations she founded and in which she was active. After Charles’s death in 1963, Frankie ran the store into the 1980s. She died in 1989.