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Oak Grove’s Quartets
The Oak Grove community seven miles northwest of Chandler produced three quartets that are known, though there may have been other offshoots that remain unknown to the author of this essay. The two principal ones were the Oak Grove Quartet and the Thronesbery Quartet, with the Pounds Quartet forming a short-lived branch in northern California in the mid-1950s.
For many years Glenn Goble , born in 1900, was the lead singer for the Oak Grove Quartet. His 1992 obituary notice supplied an initial starting point for the present essay, but it had to be revised. Listing some of his achievements, the obit said “he also was president of Pleasant Ridge Cemetery Association, Sunday school superintendent at Oak Grove, and a member of the Oak Grove Quartet for 48 years.” This last figure would mean that the Oak Grove Quartet began performing in 1944, but a news clip from 1937 provides a date seven years earlier and it adds an important name to the story. The Lincoln County Republican for November 1937 reported:
Gertie and Gladys Stidham and Glen Goble attended the Singing School at Springdale Thursday evening that was being taught by R. B. Condry.
Gertie appears here because she was Gladys’s twin sister, and the unmarried couple (they would marry in 1938) would have required a chaperone.
The big question raised by this report is the location of Springdale. One’s first thought is of Springdale, Arkansas, a large city in the northwest corner of that state, but that would have been too long a journey, even if carried on the wings of a dove. Not to mention the cost of gasoline at the Great Depression. A more likely venue would be a school-and-church northwest of Stroud, but more likely still would be the Springdale south of Chandler. This school has a FaceBook page, and a member of “Springdale School Memories” kindly sent the following directions: “From the Chandler intersection of 18 and 66 go 5 miles south on 18 to 960 Road, then west approximately 1/4 mile at 3430 Road to the first intersection, then north to the first driveway/building on the east side of the road. That is Springdale District 75. It’s a residence now. The original stone building is there.” Gladys and Glenn’s son Lyndon, who still lives on the old home place northwest of town, agrees that this is probably the Springdale in question.
The date for the beginnings of the quartet may be pushed back one more year if we consider another important figure, that of Winston Wilson (1914-2005), an early member of the quartet who moved to Texas about 1940. The Wilsons were an Oak Grove family, having moved there from Arkansas about 1920. Winston appears in a 1929 photograph of the Oak Grove students published in my first book, North of Deep Fork (p. 235), though the photograph is taken at too great a distance to identify faces. The Chandler newspapers for the late 1930s contain regular references to Winston’s participation in singing conventions along with Glenn and Gladys Goble and the Thronesbery brothers. In April of 1936, for example, a group of them are reported going to Payne County for a singing. Winston may have been the first bass singer--the “other gentleman” referred to by Melba Thronesbery below--whose place was later taken by Ray Thronesbery.
Career of R. B. Condry
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R. B. Condry
We will later hear from Melba Thronesbery, one of the two living members of the Oak Grove and Thronesbery Quartets, but such memories among people still alive are too few to provided much guidance for the present essay. The most important thread to lead us through the labyrinth of obscure places and singing schools is provided by R. B. Condry, well known in Lincoln County and environs as a leader of singing schools and conventions. He was the chief driving force in the development of gospel quartet singing in Lincoln and other counties around the state. He taught piano, voice, harmony, and shape-note reading, and he tuned pianos. He was president of various singing organizations in the county and as far east as Tulsa, where he sometimes resided when he was not living in Stroud. Most importantly for the historian, his activities were followed by the local newspapers.
Russell Blevins Condry was born in Mountain Home, Baxter County, Arkansas in 1888, one of nineteen children of parents who came from Georgia, a state known as the home of many fine traditions of gospel singing, both black and white. In Scott County, Arkansas, in 1909 he married Allie Mae Satterfield, with whom he would have eight children, a few of whom would accompany their father on his musical journeys. At one point in the early 1930s they formed their own Condry Quartet, but the father’s early occupation was that of barber, a trade he first practiced in Tahlequah after his marriage and then continued in Stroud in the 1920s. One would like to imagine that Mr. Condry’s was a musical barbershop, a venue for barbershop quartet singing, but no evidence of this exists.
The first evidence of his musical interests emerged in the Stroud newspaper for May 1931, when he was reported to be organizing a musical convention: “R. B. Condry, formerly of this place, but now residing at Chandler, was here Thursday in the interest of a singing convention to be held in Chandler in the near future.” He must have been active in the field of gospel music before this date, however, for in November 1931 he was re-elected president of the District Singing Convention held at Kendrick, a town he often visited.
In April of 1934 Mr. Condry is found leading “community singing” at the Church of God in Stroud, a church that had been constructed a decade earlier with money provided by the widow of William A. Earp, a family who would continue to provide support for the singings in the coming decade. Claudia Kay (Earp) Rice, her granddaughter, played piano for him in the 1950s and remembers him as “a great man.” Janie Sue (Anderson) Anderson, another granddaughter, also remembers him in a recent email:
He would lead the “singing” at the Church of God at Stroud when I was growing up. I remember one singing school he held at the Friends Church in Chandler. Mother and [my sister] Doris and I attended it. It was one of the ones that you used “shape notes” to read the music. Bro. Condry gave piano lessons at Stroud, too. The Condrys lived for a while on the northwest corner of the same street where Grandma Earp’s house was located, right across the street from the Church of God parsonage.
The author of the present essay, as a small boy, also briefly attended one of Mr. Condry’s singing schools in the basement of the Friends Church in Chandler accompanied by his parents and siblings.
Mr. Condry appears to have stopped leading singing schools during World War II, for nothing appears in the papers during those years, but if so he resumed after the war. The easiest way to present his thirty-year career is simply to offer lists, and let their place names tell the story. The Lincoln County towns where he held singings include (alphabetically) Agra, Arlington, Chandler, Kendrick, Meeker, Mounds, Prague, Sparks, Stroud, Tryon, Warwick, and Wellston. The rural communities include Baker School, Bethel Grove, Centerview, Concord, Midlothian, Morning Star, Oak Grove (Chandler and Stroud), Pleasant Ridge, Salt Creek, Springdale, Stone Church, Union Graded , and Victor (formerly Clematis, south of Davenport). The towns outside Lincoln County include Bristow, Claremore, Bixby, Cushing, El Reno, Haskell, Jenks, Kellyville, Keystone, Muskogee, Oilton, Sapulpa, Stella, Stigler, Tecumseh, and Wilburton.
As a leader of singing schools Mr. Condry was most active in the 1930s and 1940s. By the early 1950s, he has tapered off. The papers last report him leading a singing school in May of 1951. His wife Allie Mae died in that same month at the age of 65, and Mr. Condry, three years younger, might have felt it was time to bank his embers, but instead he remarried. The number of people attending his singing conventions had not merely held steady, it was increasing throughout the 1950s, or at least that was certainly the case in Lincoln County.
Gospel Singing Schools, Nation-Wide and Chandler
It behooves us then to examine briefly the popularity of singing schools from the beginning of Mr. Condry’s career through the 1950s. Singing schools are a long-standing cultural institution in the United States, especially in the South. Historically, singing schools have been held under the auspices of particular Protestant denominations that maintain a tradition of a cappella singing, such as the Church of Christ, the Church of God, and the Primitive Baptists. Others are associated with Sacred Harp, Southern Gospel, and similar singing traditions, whose music is religious in character but sung outside the context of church services.The music taught in singing schools used shape notation, in which the notes are assigned particular shapes to indicate their pitch. Some churches like the Baptists used hymnals printed in shape notes. In Chandler, a holiness church and a primitive baptist church were still using shape-note hymnals in the 1950s (author’s collection).
Wikipedia provides a convenient overview:
Singing schools were often taught by traveling singing masters who would stay in a location for a few weeks and teach a singing school. A singing school would be a large social event for a town; sometimes nearly everyone in the town would attend and people would come from many miles away. Many young men and women saw singing schools as important to their courtship traditions. Sometimes the entire life of a town would be put on hold as everyone came out to singing school. In this way, singing schools resembled tent revivals.
Laura Ingalls Wilder related attending a singing school as a young lady in These Happy Golden Years, one of the Little House books. Her husband, Almanzo Wilder, courted her there.
While Wiki is fine for the wider view of the history of gospel singing convocations, this essay’s focus is on Chandler and its gospel quartets. While the glimpse of the national stage provides useful background, Chandler’s role on this stage is but a small part. To which the proper reply is, Yes, a small thing but our own. Sadly, with the passage of the inevitable years, the living people who remember the quartets are of advanced ages and fading memories. Thus, for most of local memory, we are left with the newspapers.
Fortunately they supply a wealth of information, for singing conventions were big social events and considered newsworthy. Let us start with a list provided by counting the number of news articles containing the phrase “singing convention” in and around Chandler between the years 1938 and 1964 as collected in the database newspapers.com. The first entry, for example, shows that the database records 29 articles.
1938 | 29 hits |
1940 | 17 hits |
1941 | 9 hits |
1942 | 7 hits |
1943 | 8 hits |
1944 | 6 hits |
1945 | 3 hits |
1946 | 11 hits |
1947 | 6 hits |
1948 | 9 hits |
1949 | 12 hits |
1950 | 11 hits |
1951 | 17 hits |
1952 | 11 hits |
1953 | 6 hits |
1954 | 10 hits |
1955 | 16 hits |
1956 | 31 hits |
1957 | 57 hits |
1958 | 37 hits |
1959 | 21 hits |
1959 | 21 hits |
1960 | 18 hits |
1961 | 20 hits |
1962 | 12 hits |
1963 | 16 hits |
1964 | 6 hits |
1965 | 0 hits |
Singing conventions were at an early height in 1938, the year with which the above chart begins. They taper off in the war years 1940-1945, but after that quickly return to reach an all time high in 1957. This would correspond roughly to the years of rock and roll’s greatest impact, as though the two music genres were playing a super bowl, but “bless my soul / rock ‘n’ roll” was here to stay whereas gospel singing beat a retreat first from public concerts to records and radio, then after a big slump, made a resurgence with the internet in our own day, where Southern Gospel reigns king in both its black and white forms.
The first period is well recorded by news articles in the Chandler papers, of which we will notice a few. If March is the start of the season, it’s kicked off with a quarter-page ad:
In April of 1938 we read, the singing is already going strong: “Although attendance at the monthly singing convention held in the Armory here Sunday was not as large as a previous meetings, well over 600 persons from all parts of the county were present.” Six hundred is a substantial number, and unlike rural schools and churches the Armory was a venue big enough to hold the people. From a statement in the next month’s paper, it would appear that these singings had become regular events:
The annual Lincoln County singing convention will be held in Chandler next Saturday and Sunday, according to Bill Cooper, chairman of the rural elations committee of the chamber of commerce, which has been sponsoring singing conventions here monthly since the first of the year.
The county convention will open Sat night at the Odeon theatre. Sunday's meeting will be held at the Armory. Between 1,500 and 2,000 people are expected to attend the meetings.
In May of 1938 we read, “fifteen hundred people, the largest attendance in the history of the organization, were present Sunday for the annual meeting of Lincoln County Singing Conventions held in the Armory here.”
With this level of popularity, it was not long before the music was broadcast by radio. In June of 1938, under the headline “Local and County Singers to Be Heard on Broadcast," we read:
The Tulsa Junior Chamber of Commerce and the rural relations committee of the Chandler Chamber of Commerce are combining their efforts Sunday to furnish an afternoon of first class entertainment to those who attend the monthly singing conventions and to radio listeners who tune their sets to the Good Neighbor programs emanating from Tulsa radio stations each Sunday afternoon.
In case any enthusiasts are missing the Good Neighbor radio program, the Sparks News gives the call letters:
Mrs. Leonard Patterson of Seminole, Mrs. Othle Massey, Miss Minnie Frazier and Miss Frances Massey formed the Sparks ladies' quartette who sang on the Good Neighbor broadcast of the county singing convention by remote control from station KVOO, Tulsa, during Sunday afternoon.
Among the bigger events mentioned in the above data was the appearance of the famous Stamps-Baxter Quartet on July 28-29, 1956.
A word about the origin of this quartet. Like his Chandler counterpart R. B. Condry, Virgil Oliver Stamps (1892 – 1940) was a shape note promoter, singer, composer, and singing school teacher. V. O. Stamps was born in and raised in the Stamps Community in Upshur County, Texas, and was a key individual in early gospel music publishing. As a youth, he worked with his father in a sawmill, and used his earnings to purchase every gospel songbook he could find. In 1907 he attended the singing school of Richard M. Morgan. Sometime after that, his father bought a small store and V. O. worked there while teaching singing schools. In 1914 he became a field representative for the James D. Vaughan Music Company of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. Around 1915 he composed his first song, entitled "The Man Behind the Plow". In 1924 he founded the V. O. Stamps Music Company in Jacksonville, Texas. In 1927, with J. R. Baxter, Stamps formed the Stamps-Baxter Music Company, based in Dallas, and Stamps organized a gospel quartet in which he sang bass. He was a pioneer in the use of radio for promoting Southern gospel music and quartet singing. Radio station KRLD gave the quartet a daily show in 1936, after a large response from their radio performance at the Texas Centennial Exposition.
Stamps-Baxter Hymnal, 1944
Wiki offers a detailed report on the company:
The company issued several paperback publications each year with cheap binding and printed on cheap paper. These songbooks were used in church singing events, called "conventions," as well as at other church events, although they did not take the place of regular hymnals. Among the country music and bluegrass "standards" that were first published by Stamps-Baxter are "Rank Strangers to Me", "Just a Little Talk with Jesus", "Precious Memories", "Farther Along", "If We Never Meet Again", "Victory in Jesus", and "I Won't Have to Cross Jordan Alone."
Stamps and Baxter operated a music school which was the primary source of the thousands of gospel songs they published. Another major part of the corporation was its sponsorship of gospel quartets who sang the company's music in churches throughout the southern United States. At the end of World War II they were sponsoring 35 such quartets. The company also had a quartet who sang on radio station KRLD in Dallas, beginning in 1936. This station would boost its transmitting power at midnight, so that it could be heard across the nation.
Stamps-Baxter Shape-Note Hymnal, 1956
Two other foundational items contributed to the Stamps-Baxter fame. First, it was the publication of their many shape-note songbooks (three to four per year, according to one source) that produced the money that kept their enterprise going and made their name famous. Frank Stamps, brother of V. O., published a Stamps Newsletter in Dallas TX, where R. B. Condry published two letters in 1960 announcing Oklahoma events. Then, as the Stamps-Baxter Quartet they reached something like stardom with the help of Elvis Presley, who liked to use the quartet for backup singers. Presley was a great fan of the bass singer J. D. Sumner and arranged for him to sing at his funeral.
A final note on song books is provided by Mary Ann Goble Greb, pianist for the Oak Grove Quartet, who has contributed a scan of one of her oldest shape note hymnals.
World Wide Church Songs was originally published in 1949, “compiled by the Stamps Quartet [of Dallas TX] and their editorial staff, assisted by ministers and song leaders of the various churches.” It was subtitled Gospel Hit Parade.
The Two Quartets and One More
Information about the early years of the Thronesbery Quartet singing around Oak Grove is provided by Melba Thronesbery Lankford Ewing, daughter of Floyd Thronesbery, who sang the high tenor part for the Thronesberys. The earlier quartet was composed of Melba, her sister Carolyn, and their parents Floyd and Opal. Melba was also the pianist. In a FaceBook Messenger note from January 2023 she states:
My Father was born in 1915. When he was 19 or 20 he had to have an emergency appendectomy in OKC and they had to call my grandmother to get permission to do the surgery. When the doctor dismissed Daddy he told him God wasn't through with him because he should have died.
Daddy had a lengthy recovery and he heard about a 2-week shaped note singing school and he wanted to attend. I assume it was at Oak Grove and was taught by Mr. R. B. Condry. When my Dad told Grandma [that] he wanted to attend she told him they didn't have money for gas for their car [and] he said he could walk. She said she [already] saw how long it took him to walk from the house to the barn. He said he had all day and all night to walk the trek. There were others that had to walk too and by the time the school was over he was keeping up with the others. Best exercise he could have done.
If Floyd was twenty at the time of this episode, that would push the date of the Quartet’s origins back to 1935.
Melba offers another comment. She states, “I think Glenn was singing with the Oak Grove Quartet a little earlier than 1944. Mama and Daddy were married in 1940 and I think they they were singing together at that time. In fact, Mama and Daddy's first date was to a singing in Stroud and they rode with Glenn.” The needle of this comment once again points to roughly the year 1937 as a starting point for the Quartet as Floyd walked the miles from the Thronesbery home near Carney to the Oak Grove schoolhouse.
In that year Floyd was not singing but working in a CCC camp in Guthrie. In 1946 the papers reported him back singing with his brother Ray and the Gobles at a funeral for Charles M. “Charlie” Stinson, a well-known Oak Grove farmer. Three years later he is reported as singing with the same group for the funeral of Mrs. George V. Clark, who was buried at Pleasant Ridge. His talent and dedication must have been recognized early, for in 1952 he was reported as song director at a revival held in the Stone School House. And in 1956 he was leading a singing convention at the First Baptist church seven miles south of Chandler on Highway 18 and a half mile west. And in September of that year he lead the Lincoln County Singing Convention at Fairview Friendly Center as well as helping to provide music for Old Settlers’ Day. A big event followed in January of 1957, the annual meeting of the Cimarron Valley Fox and Wolf Hunters Association (1937-1965) held at Merrick, with crowds estimated at 2000 to 2500 people over three nights, and the Thronesberys providing the singing on Friday night. At some point in the 1950s, Floyd’s teenage daughters Melba and Carolyn had become mature enough to join their father and Uncle Ray as the Thronesbery Quartet.
Again on FaceBook, Melba recently reported as follows:
I started my first 3 years in Pleasant School [1 mile west and 5 miles south of Davenport ] and my sister started in the first grade before moving to town. It was during that time that Daddy taught us the shape notes. Also, during that time Mama took a correspondence 3-year piano course by Leroy Abernathy. When she got where she could play for us Daddy started us girls singing and I guess that was when the TQ began. My sister sang soprano, Mama sang alto and Daddy sang bass and taught me to sing tenor an octave higher which is my favorite part to this day, even though I can't sing that high anymore.
In a FaceBook message sent January of the present year, Melba offered some additional details:
It seems as though wherever Mr. Condry taught he liked to start a quartet. Only a few stayed together for any length of time like the OG Quartet. Daddy sang tenor, Glenn sang lead, Gladys sang alto and played the piano, and another gentleman sang bass but later moved to California and my Uncle Ray Thronesbery took over that part.
The two quartets, the Oak Grove and the Thronesbery, overlapped in membership. In practice, this meant that when a member of one quartet could not be present, a member from the other quartet sang the part. They may even have sometimes shared the name, judging from the fact that a cassette recording my family received from Melba Thronesbery twenty years ago labels the singers as the Oak Grove Quartet. Melba, however, states recently that the Thronesberys were never known as the Oak Grove Quartet, and that makes perfect sense. The two groups shared personnel but had distinct identities.
In another recent FaceBook message, Melba wrote:
The OG Quartet sang for quite some time in the Lincoln County area. They sang a few years at the Carney and Oak Grove Cemeteries on Memorial Day. Dewey Curry owned the funeral home there in Chandler and he would call on the OG Quartet to sing at a lot of funerals; even some even when they didn't know the families. I'm not sure how long they sang together but probably as long as they possibly could.
About 1963 Melba sent my siblings and myself a cassette tape of the Oak Grove Quartet’s music featuring the Thronesbery family. Some of the hymns are "Jericho Road," “The Master's Bouquet,” “He Bore It All,” “Praise God I'm Free,” and “If We Never Meet Again.” I heard the quartet sing “If We Never Meet Again” at the funeral of my grandfather Thomas Pounds in 1966. It is to be hoped that either Melba or myself will
upload some of the quartet’s music to youtube.com for a wider audience to enjoy but it hasn’t been done yet.
Funeral Program for Thomas Pounds, June 1966
At this late date it would be impossible to assemble a list of the songs the quartets sang, but the Funeral section of the index to an old shape-note hymnal in my possession (Sacred Songs, 1952) lists the following: “Gathering Buds,” “I’ll Meet You in the Morning,” “No Tears in Heaven,” “Think of the Home Over There,” “Precious Memories,” “Shall We Gather at the River,” “That Glad Reunion Day,” “The Last Mile of the Way,” “What a Gathering That Will Be,” “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder,” “When They Ring the Golden Bells,” “Will My Mother Know Me There?” All of these songs would have been familiar to the two quartets, and many of them must have been in their repertory.
The Thronesbery Quartet was an important group in Lincoln County, but the additional quartet I’ll mention was neither important nor did it perform in Oklahoma, and I mention it only for reasons of sentiment and to complete the record of R. B. Condry’s influence. The Pounds Quartet owed its origins to Mr. Condry but it is one that he may not have known about and certainly never heard unless it was on a recording. All of the members of the Pounds Quartet of Kelseyville, California came originally from Oak Grove northwest of Chandler and knew Mr. Condry personally and probably had learned from his lessons. The female members were Bessie Pounds (one of three Pounds siblings) and Hazel Pounds (wife of Melvin) with Archie Pounds on baritone and his brother Melvin on bass. Melvin and Hazel’s daughter Deborah was usually the pianist. This quartet flourished briefly about 1955, when Bessie’s husband Earl Strong rented a record-making machine and scored an evening of the Quartet’s singing on wax. The technical quality of the discs is poor, but the feeling still shines through the dust of the years.
A Tribute to the Oak Grove Quartet
As a way of signaling the sunset of Glenn Goble’s career, I’ll note that a recent email from Lyndon Goble states that Glenn continued to attend Sunday singings until the 1980s, which takes us very near the year of his demise.
I will close this very imperfect survey of the Oak Grove Quartet and gospel quartet singing with a tribute written in 1972 byTrig Bowen, long time Otasco dealer on Manvel Avenue (the main street) in Chandler and for some years an important supporter of Chandler’s summer baseball camps. The document itself hangs today in the home of Lyndon and Amy Goble, who have kindly provided me with the scan which appears below followed by a transcription. Like Trig Bowen, I can say that These words are from a thankful heart” and I trust that God will bless us all through our memories of these very special people.
"A Tribute"
For: Oak Grove Quartet
Ray and Floyd Thronesbery, Gladys and Glenn Goble
To find the words to express my feelings and gratitude of thanks is most difficult, for what you people are doing--Singing at so many funerals, the dear precious great old songs of all times, the ones I heard and sang in church when just a lad. These songs will live forever that you sang--Keep Singing. Surely, you all have a warm and gracious heart, to give you time so often, to sing at so many funerals. I know that God will place a star in your crown for each one you sing, when you get to the other world. Your blended voices will even be better when you sing in the great beyond. This good community is blessed to have you as part of it. People appreciate you very much, even though they may not have ever told you. Therefore, I am telling you, not only from me, but from all the good people who have heard you sing. A funeral without a good Old Gospel song, is like a prayer with out words. Accept these few simple words from my heart, as a Bouquet of Red Roses arranged in a vase of pure Crystal Clear Glass. Water them with good deeds and they will never wilt or die--Never. Never. These words are from a thankful heart. May God Bless you all: very special people.
By: Trig Bowen
May 3, 1972
Special thanks: to the five surviving participants with personal knowledge of the quartets and Mr. Condry: Janie Sue (Anderson) Anderson, Melba (Thronesbery Lankford Ewing, Mary Ann (Goble) Greb, Lyndon Goble, and Claudia Kay (Earp) Rice. Their personal knowledge lends authenticity to this enterprise. Honesty compels the author to note that four of these five people are his second cousins.
Sources
“Chandler Baseball Camp. https://www.facebook.com/ChandlerBaseballCamp/. Accessed January 2023.
“Hide Me, Rock of Ages.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnqSdLifCCw. Accessed January 2023.
Pounds, Wayne. The Autobiography of Mary Frances Earp. Columbia SC: Kindle, May 2018.
_____. North of Deep Fork: A Lincoln County Farm Family in Hard Times. Charleston SC: Create Space, 2011.
“Stamps Quartet.” https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/stamps-quartet. Accessed January 2023.
Stavenhagen, Cody. “Field of Dreams: Two Men Working to Restore Historic Chandler Baseball Camp.” The Oklahoman. https://www.oklahoman.com/story/sports/high-school/baseball/2014/07/05/fields-of-dreams-two-men-working-to-restore-historic-chandler-baseball-camp/60814053007/. Accessed January 2023.
Weiner, Robert G. (1996) "Gospel Music Pioneer: Frank Stamps." East Texas Historical Journal 34.2. Available at: https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ethj/vol34/iss2/11. Accessed Jan. 2023.
