Music Boys Age

With 158 hits on 10 CDs, the 'Golden Age of Country' is the most comprehensive collection ever devoted to country music of the 1950s and '60s. We've brought together all the major C&W stars and their hits from the two most important decades in the genre's history. It's a dream collection for any fan of classic country music.

The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi was an American post-war gospel quartet. With lead singer Archie Brownlee, their single "Our Father" reached number ten on the Billboard R&B charts in early 1951.[1] It was one of the first gospel records to do so.

The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi should not be confused with The Blind Boys of Alabama, a group led by Clarence Fountain. There is some dispute as to which of the two groups was named first. Some sources say that the Five Blind Boys took their name when Percell Perkins joined them in the mid-1940s. According to Fountain, however, the two groups were actually christened simultaneously during a Newark, New Jersey quartet contest in 1948.

This wonderful four-disc, 105-track box of postwar Afro-American gospel releases from the 1940s and 1950s was compiled by record collector and gospel historian Opal Louis Nations, and it perfectly captures what was surely a golden age for black gospel. Gospel as we now know it emerged in the South in the early '30s, an outgrowth of the right to assemble and the advent of gospel songwriters like Thomas A. Dorsey (who had sung previously in the secular arena as Georgia Tom), who brought the blues to church, tossed in some ragtime piano rhythms, and almost single-handedly created the genre to the point that his compositions were simply known as "Dorseys.