TODAY, FEW REMEMBER THE HARTFORD MUSIC COMPANY of Hartford, Arkansas, although some have heard of its most famous pupil, Albert Brumley, author of I'll Fly Away and many other fixtures in the American popular/religious music canon. Among a dwindling number of the faithful, however, the company's central figure, E. M. Bartlett, remains a towering figure. His Victory in Jesus has been heavily anthologized, and there is no doubt that between 1920 and 1950 the Hartford Music Company was one of the hottest things going in the heartland of published music. Its musical institute trained hundreds of teachers and musicians each year. The company's songbooks sold up to 100,000 copies annually during the 1930s.1 At the center of a vast network of music teachers, students, musicians, convention singers, and songwriters, Hartford helped the flourish in the South between the world wars. The grew out of the popular religious musical expression and entrepreneurship of the nineteenth century. The Hartford Company's most influential predecessors included the RuebushKieffer Music Company of Virginia and the Showalter Music Company of Georgia. Named for their founders, these companies published books that included both traditional, folk-oriented religious songs and new compositions, which were often written specifically for these publications. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the newer songs, whose style owed more to northern urban revival and popular secular songs-with their diatonic (eight note scale) melodies and sweet triadic harmonies-began outnumbering the traditional ones, which often had favored pentatonic (five note) scales and the more open, stark harmonies characteristic of singing books like the Sacred Harp.2 The newer songs came to be written in fairly complex four-part lines, reflecting the influence of the music conventions, their trained singers, and four-part harmony. They resembled what is commonly known today as the quartet-dominated country or southern sound, most closely associated with white rather than African-American performers and audiences. This music is best termed songbook gospel because of the prevalent influence of the companies, whose musical publications, primarily annual and biannual songbooks, and educational activities trained several generations of teachers, singers, and songwriters. The organized, educational nature of the companies' activities can legitimately be termed a movement. In the first half of the twentieth century these companies' music and influence literally blanketed the South. By teaching huge numbers of people to read and write music, company schools and conventions represented a kind of literacy program. The term movement is also appropriate because the activities that constituted the world were representative of the religiously conservative, largely rural subculture that characterized large portions of the region. The Stamps-Baxter Music Company of Dallas, for instance, became virtually a household word in the American South. Music companies like Hartford need to be recognized as salient cultural signifiers not only of social continuity but of social change in the twentieth-century South. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the South and its border states were still largely rural and agricultural but were beginning to reflect the growing influence of the industrial city and its newer communication technologies. These companies and their music bridged older and newer ways of life. The sentiments of their songs reflected traditional family and spiritual values. But the songs were also the products of a vast, mass production-oriented commercial enterprise, which utilized the latest available technology (large-scale printing, radio, and sound recording) and foreshadowed an urbanized, mobile, media-saturated society. For example, the Vaughan Music Company, which traced its roots to the nineteenth century, claimed to have operated the first radio station in Tennessee. …