Fay Thompson to sign book on gospel singing at Virtually Unlimited Bookstore Nov. 4

Release Date: 10/5/2004. Expired: 11/4/2004

Former voice and piano teacher Fay Jennings Thompson will sell and sign copies of her book, Notes on Shaped Notes, a chronicle of convention-style gospel music, at the Virtually Unlimited Bookstore inside The Renaissance Center in Dickson on Nov. 4.

Thompson will be in the bookstore beginning at 5:30 p.m. Nov. 4 and will be available to sign books until the end of intermission during that night’s Solid Gospel series concert featuring the Chuck Wagon Gang.

Thompson, who spent her life in gospel music, taught voice and piano at Nashville’s Free Will Baptist Bible College, in a private studio and in “singing schools” sponsored by the Vaughan Music Publishing Company of Lawrenceburg, Tenn. She continues as a faculty member at the Cumberland Valley School of Gospel Music held each June in Pulaski, Tenn.

Her book, subtitled Remembering... Some Places, Events, and People in the History of Traditional Convention-Style Gospel Music, spans the years from the time of the early seven-shaped-note songbooks by reporting on the pioneers and their publications. It includes information on the music schools that swept the South, coming out of Virginia into Tennessee and Texas.

In addition to 33 brief chapters on the history of convention singing, the 143-page softcover includes more than 50 photographs of those gospel music pioneers, including one of Thompson with Tennessee’s World War I hero Sgt. Alvin C. York, who became influential in convention singing after his Christian conversion.

“I don’t remember being at the first gospel singing I attended because I was a baby in a basket,” Thompson writes in the biographical introduction to the book. “I went to every singing and singing school that my parents, Oliver S. and Alma C. Jennings, attended. They soon got me involved. Dad arranged for me to sing a solo on Nashville radio station WSIX when I was only two years old.”

Thompson and her parents, performing as the Jennings Trio, were a widely hailed group in gospel music.

She began singing soprano in the Old Hickory Junior Quartet at age eight and at 11 began teaching piano to students after school and on weekends.

The Jennings Trio began a weekly gospel radio program on WSIX shortly after World War II ended, occasionally singing on television and performing regularly at the All Nite Singings at the Ryman Auditorium, birthplace of the Grand Ole Opry.

She earned her Bachelor of Music degree in 1953 from George Peabody College for Teachers, now a part of Vanderbilt University, and took graduate music classes and taught piano at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary before receiving her Master of Music degree in voice from Peabody in 1961.

Thompson taught on the musical faculty at Free Will Baptist Bible College for more than 20 years and served 34 years as pianist and assistant organist at Nashville’s Immanuel Baptist Church.

“I owe much to seven-shaped-note singers and singings because that is where I got my start in music,” Thompson writes. “This book is a record of some of the places, events, and people I remember from my long life in gospel music.”

Copies of Notes on Shaped Notes, published by Fields Publishing Inc., are available in the Virtually Unlimited Bookstore for $12 and can be purchased in advance or during Thompson’s visit beginning at 5:30 p.m. Nov. 4.

The Virtually Unlimited Bookstore is open 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Mondays, 9 a.m.-7 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays and 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturdays. For more information, call (615)740-5512.

The Renaissance Center is an arts and technology education and performing arts center at 855 Highway 46 South in Dickson, just 35 miles west of Nashville on Interstate 40 at exit 172.