The product table after the program

The van backs up to the kitchen door while the last chorus is still settling over the pews. Two men lift the folding table from behind the third row of seats, and by the time the closing prayer is over, the table stands at the rear of the fellowship hall, one leg propped on a hymnal where the concrete slopes. The cash box goes down first, then the box of cassettes, then the CDs in two short rows. This is the first number of the book: the table itself, in the minutes before the crowd reaches it.

At a Tampa fellowship hall the table stood against the wall where the baptistry steps come down. At a Macon program it blocked the coat closet. The position changes from hall to hall. The contents do not.

What sat on the table, left to right

The order is the same on every table the book set down. On the left, the cassettes, in clear cases with inserts printed on light stock. On the right, the CDs, jewel cases cracked at the corners. In the middle, the cash box, a gray metal box with a small lock, and under the box a program folded in three, its front panel showing the group in matching robes and its inside panel holding the order of service.

The inventory followed the evening. The cassette of the song that closed the first half sat on top of the stack, its label copy checked against the program, because that was the tune still humming in the room. A pencil price ran along the table edge: three, five, eight.

How much did a cassette go for at the door?

Three dollars bought the single, the one song on each side, the one the choir closed with. Five bought the album length, ten or twelve songs. Eight dollars bought the CD when the CD arrived, and ten when the recording session had cost more than usual. These figures are modest, and they are written down, which matters more than their size.

The prices were not printed on the covers. They lived on the table edge, or on a torn piece of a shoebox propped against the cash box. Prices changed when the pressing changed. The cover stayed the same. The buyer saw the price before the cover, which was the point: the money was settled first, then the music. Nobody haggled.

Who kept the box

The box was kept by someone who already handled money for the group: the treasurer, the church secretary, the oldest daughter. At the Tampa hall the same woman who counted the offering after the morning service sat behind the table all evening and did not sing the last two numbers, because by then the line had formed.

She opened the box for every sale, made change from a small envelope of singles, and marked each sale on a sheet torn from a ledger. The book checked this against the ledger sheet itself, which was left on the table until the last cassette was sold. Sales and the love offering were kept apart, in the same box but in different compartments. Asked after the last sale, she could say to the dollar what the evening had taken.

Why did the stock follow the set list?

Because the table sold what the room had just heard. The newest recording sat at the front of the right-hand row, and the oldest at the back, where the cover had faded. A choir of forty voices that had traveled in three vans could sell through one box of tapes in an evening, and did, when the program had been good.

The table was the last verse of the program. It turned the singing into an object, something that could ride home in a glove compartment. The program folded in three told you the order of service; the tape told you what it sounded like. The songs themselves had been learned by rote, the starting pitch from a pitch pipe, the tempo kept by a metronome on the piano lid, in two rehearsals a week. A Gainesville shelf, checked later, held one of each pressing in the same order, set list first: the table's order, kept long after the table was gone.

What survived when the cassette went away?

The format change was not sudden. The tables held both formats for several seasons, the cassettes moving left, then to a cardboard box on the floor. What survived the change is documented elsewhere: the Library of Congress collection holds gospel recordings in both formats, and its catalog entries, public record, keep the label names and the catalog numbers long after the tables are folded.

The Smithsonian Folkways notes to its African American sacred music series describe the singing; the table is where the singing was sold. A cassette kept the call and response; a program folded in three could not. A cassette that outlived its format is a small archive of a single evening, and the archives that kept it are now the record of the record. The cassette moved from the table to the shelf, and the shelf is where the book found it.

The economics of a ministry record

The table was a small economy, complete in itself. A pressing of a few hundred copies, sold at three and five and eight dollars, paid for the studio time that made the next one. The cash box did not make anyone rich; it kept the machine turning. Imprints of the kind that stocked these tables, Malaco out of Jackson, Savoy, the local studio's own label, shipped the boxes and sometimes took the unsold ones back.

The ministry record existed to be carried away. Its value was set at the door, in cash, on the night, and it was spent on the next recording before the month was out. That is the whole account: a table, a box, a stack, and the next recording.

Nor does it cover the tables that were never photographed. Most evenings ended with the table folded and the box in the van, and no record of the record remains. The line of the book stops at the edge of the table, and this notebook stops with it.

A chorister can photograph the table before the first sale of the evening, stock list and all, and write the catalog numbers on the back of the program. A collector can run those numbers against the catalog of the Library of Congress and see whether the tape was ever archived. A Sunday visitor can buy the one cassette the choir closed with and play it in the car before the parking lot clears.

The table is still there, after the program. Someone should write it down.