Came from Sankey, but applied to a whole genre of gospel songs. I learned it here at Mudcat; it's not so much his particular songs, as I recall, but those he published. We need a new thread about it-- the gist is that during a partcular time, gospel groups (I'm compressing a huge amount of imfo here) traveled around promoting songbooks. They'd perform, and sell the booklets afterwards much as we Catters now sell CDs after an appearance. This capitalized on the Revival movement(s). On TV, the Gaither Homecoming Hour series is an example of one way it's done now. If I had time to manage it properly I'd start a series of threads. It can't be done by cataloguing Sankey's OWN songs.... things published under his name as author. It's about the thousands of little songbooks, often self-published, that still turn up here and there. Sometimes people send them to me when they find 'em in garage sales, used bookstores, etc. It was a big phenomenon in the southern gospel community. Sometimes the performers were described as "singing teachers," and sometimes the events were called "conventions," but it was really a religio-commercial venture.

Stroke-brain here-- lots of details floating around, maybe conflated wrongly. Spotty picture-- sorry.

~Susan