Appalachian Figures
On a Sunday morning in south central Kentucky it is easy to find a worn red or brown shape note songbook on a church pew. Open to the right page and you may see a familiar chorus like “Peace Like a River,” “Tell It Everywhere You Go,” or “What Is He Worth To Your Soul,” with a small credit line at the bottom for W. B. Walbert. Many singers never pause over the name, yet behind those initials stands a Kentucky born songwriter who helped define the sound of early southern gospel and the culture of the singing school.
William Burton Walbert was born on May 18, 1886, in Barren County, close to Fountain Run near the Kentucky Tennessee line. Contemporary hymn writers and researchers who have combed genealogical sources agree that he was the son of James Hickman “Hick” Walbert and Elvina J. Simmons Walbert, a farm family with several children in the rolling hill country of south central Kentucky. Later family memorials and cemetery records place him in a larger Walbert clan whose graves stretch from rural Barren County down to Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, where many of the Vaughan and Walbert families now rest at Mimosa Cemetery.
That landscape matters. In the twentieth century, historian William Lynwood Montell would describe south central Kentucky as a region dense with amateur gospel music, singing conventions, and traveling teachers who carried shape note songbooks into country schools and churches. Walbert grew up inside that culture. By the time he reached young adulthood he had already left Barren County to sharpen his skills at State Normal College in Bowling Green and at Dana’s Musical Institute in Warren, Ohio. A later hymn commentary on his work notes that he studied under respected music educators such as Benjamin Unseld, Franz J. Strahm, Lynn B. Dana, W. W. Combs, Adger M. Pace, George W. Sebren, and H. A. Vandercook, a roster that bridged formal conservatory training and the southern gospel world.
From a Kentucky Singing Family to the Vaughan Circle
Sometime in the 1910s Walbert’s path crossed that of James D. Vaughan, the Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, publisher whose company would become one of the key engines of southern gospel music. Walbert married Vaughan’s daughter, Grace Mable Vaughan, usually listed in records as Grace Mable or Mable Grace. Their union tied a Barren County singing family to one of the most ambitious gospel music businesses in the South.
The couple’s son, James David “Jim” Walbert, inherited the family’s musical bent. Later biographies and obituaries for Jim Walbert regularly identify William Burton and Grace Mable Vaughan Walbert as his parents and note that both father and son would be inducted into the Southern Gospel Music Hall of Fame. In that sense the Walbert Vaughan marriage helped create a small dynasty: a Kentucky born songwriter who married into a Tennessee publishing house, raised a pianist son, and together with his in laws left a trail of scores, records, and students.
By the 1910s and 1920s Walbert was firmly embedded in the Vaughan operation. Wikipedia’s summary, which draws on obituaries and James R. Goff’s Close Harmony, describes him as working for the James D. Vaughan Music Company, teaching shape note singing schools and eventually taking charge of the Vaughan School of Music in Lawrenceburg. The singing school model was central to Vaughan’s business. Teachers like Walbert would fan out across the rural South for one or two week sessions, training church choirs, schoolchildren, and amateur quartets to read shaped notes and sing in four parts, then selling them songbooks that carried new compositions from Lawrenceburg printers back into Appalachian hollows and small towns. Goff and Montell both stress how much these schools relied on students from Kentucky and Tennessee who would carry the repertoire back home.
Songs for Conventions, Revivals, and Singing Schools
Walbert’s name shows up most clearly in the songbooks he helped fill. Hymnary.org, which indexes hymn texts and tunes, lists him as the author or composer of dozens of pieces, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. Two of his best documented songs come from Christian Choruses, a 1936 James D. Vaughan collection for “singing conventions, all day singings, singing schools, Sunday schools.” In that book Walbert appears both in initials and in full as the writer of “Glory Bound, Rejoicing,” with text and tune copyrighted to W. B. Walbert. The song opens with “Glory bells are ringing in my soul, I’m happy as I go along,” and its refrain repeats the promise of being “glory bound, rejoicing.”
Hymnary also notes Walbert as the composer of “[There’s a home of rest for the good and blest],” a tune used with the text “Where They Never Say Good-Bye,” again credited to him in Christian Choruses with copyright held in his name. These entries show him not only as a staff writer working for a publisher but also as someone who owned some of his copyrights, a small but important sign that Vaughan considered him a core creative figure.
By 1939 the follow up volume Gospel Choruses carried Walbert’s authorship even farther. Hymnary’s page images and metadata for Gospel Choruses list his song “Abiding In His Love,” first line “Lovelight is shining and no more I’m repining,” as hymn 107, with Walbert credited as author and Arthur R. Vaughan as composer of the tune. Later Vaughan books, including Crowning Harmony, continued to reuse and circulate that lyric.
Another strand of his output involves collaborations and near collaborations. The hymn “Tell It Every Where You Go,” for instance, carries words by English born writer James Rowe and a tune by Walbert. The Hymn Studies blog’s discussion of that song reproduces a biographical paragraph that has become one of the clearest sketches of his life: born in Barren County near Fountain Run, educated at State Normal College of Bowling Green and Dana’s Musical Institute, married to Grace Mable Vaughan, active in various Vaughan quartets, dean of the Vaughan School of Music from 1941, editor of Vaughan’s Family Visitor, and deceased at Birmingham, Alabama, on December 2, 1959.
That same essay identifies “What Is He Worth To Your Soul” as perhaps Walbert’s best known hymn and notes that “Tell It Every Where You Go” bears a publication date of 1920. Hymnary adds titles such as “Glory Bound, Rejoicing,” “Abiding In His Love,” and tunes like “Peace Like a River” to his catalog, labeling him simply “gospel music singer, composer, and editor, long associated with the James D. Vaughan Music Company, father of noted pianist and composer James D. Walbert.”
Taken together, these songbooks and indexes form a primary source trail for his creative output. They show a songwriter who wrote for the precise situations Montell and Goff describe: all day singings, revivals, Sunday schools, and convention meetings where hundreds of singers gathered to sight read new numbers from a fresh Vaughan book, often under the eye of company writers like Walbert and Adger M. Pace.
Editor, Teacher, and Dean of the Vaughan School
If the songbooks give us Walbert’s music, the trade press and institutional sources give us his roles inside the Vaughan system. The company’s in house paper, Vaughan’s Family Visitor, began in the early 1910s as The Musical Visitor and soon evolved into a combined family magazine, song plugger, and trade organ for the southern gospel world. Later writers on the tradition, especially James R. Goff in his Church History article “The Rise of Southern Gospel Music” and his book Close Harmony, describe reading the microfilmed Family Visitor as a way to trace publishing strategies, convention reports, and profiles of Vaughan songwriters.
Within those notices Walbert appears as both editor and educator. The Hymn Studies biographical sketch and NetHymnal style reference entries draw on those company sources when they state that he edited Vaughan’s Family Visitor and became dean of the Vaughan School of Music in 1941. Obituaries published at his death echo that language. The Tennessean’s December 3, 1959 piece “William Walbert, Song Writer, Dies” and an Associated Press wire story headlined “Gospel Song Writer Dies” describe him as a gospel songwriter and identify him with the Vaughan School of Music in Lawrenceburg, reporting that he had been dean there since 1941.
Those positions gave Walbert influence beyond his own compositions. As editor he would have helped decide which conventions, quartets, and local news items made it into the widely read Family Visitor. As dean he shaped the curriculum and tone of a school that trained hundreds of singers, many of them from Appalachian Kentucky and East Tennessee, in basic music theory, sight singing, and quartet style. Goff notes that Vaughan’s school and its house paper together gave southern gospel an institutional backbone in a period when much of its energy still lay in small town singing schools and amateur conventions. Walbert’s name sits at the center of that system.
Quartets, Radios, and 78 RPM Records
Most modern listeners encounter Walbert on paper rather than on record, yet he was also an active performer. Biographical entries and the article on his colleague Adger M. Pace agree that in 1917 Walbert joined the Vaughan Saxophone Quartet with Joe Allen, Ira Foust, and Pace, one of the earliest professional quartets associated with the company. In the 1920s he sang with the Vaughan Radio Quartet, an ensemble that included Pace, Hillman Barnard, and Otis Leon McCoy and that became a familiar sound on early broadcasts from Vaughan’s Lawrenceburg station WOAN and other outlets.
The clearest primary sources for his performing voice are the 78 rpm discs the Vaughan Quartet recorded for Victor in 1928. The Discography of American Historical Recordings entry for “Sunlight and Shadows,” matrix BVE 47146, lists the Vaughan Quartet personnel as Adger M. Pace, Hillman Barnard, Otis McCoy, and W. B. Walbert, with Walbert as baritone. A companion entry for “When All Those Millions Sing,” matrix BVE 47144, records the same lineup at a session held October 5, 1928, at the YMCA building in Nashville, Tennessee.
Disc enthusiasts and 78 rpm discographies add a handful of later sides featuring Vaughan quartets with Walbert in the mix, stretching into the early 1930s. For the post war era, collectors have also identified Walbert’s pianist son James D. Walbert on radio era recordings of the Vaughan Radio Quartet, including “Echoes From the Burning Bush” and similar titles preserved on transcription discs and now often shared on YouTube.
When scholars such as Charles K. Wolfe and James R. Goff describe the sound of early southern gospel quartets, they lean heavily on records like these and on Family Visitor reports. Walbert appears there as one of the working professionals who bridged the world of amateur convention singing and the emerging market for professional quartets that could travel, broadcast, and promote new songbooks.
A Kentucky Songwriter in the “Birthplace of Southern Gospel Music”
By the late twentieth century, local and state level memory work had begun to codify Lawrenceburg’s claim as “Birthplace of Southern Gospel Music.” Two turn of the millennium resolutions highlight how central Walbert had become to that story. In 1999 the United States Senate adopted Resolution 170, which recognized Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, as the birthplace of southern gospel and, in doing so, singled out early songwriters associated with the city and the Vaughan company, including James D. Vaughan, Adger Pace, James Rowe, G. T. Speer, and William B. Walbert.
A companion Tennessee House Joint Resolution 556, passed in 2000, likewise honored Lawrenceburg and the Vaughan legacy, again listing Walbert among the first major southern gospel songwriters and noting the importance of the Vaughan School of Music, Vaughan’s Family Visitor, and WOAN. These documents are not just ceremonial. They mark the way a city in Middle Tennessee built its public identity around a music industry that had drawn heavily on talent from rural Kentucky and the wider Appalachian South. When the Southern Gospel Music Association created its Hall of Fame, W. B. Walbert joined the inaugural class of inductees in 1999 as a “Singer, Musician, Songwriter, [and] Publisher” connected with the James D. Vaughan Music Company.
Seen from an Appalachian perspective, Walbert’s career embodies the back and forth between region and industry. He came out of Barren County, a landscape of singing conventions and rural churches that Montell later chronicled in detail. He married into a Tennessee publishing house, wrote songs for books that circulated at conventions across south central Kentucky, and helped run a singing school that trained Appalachian students to carry those songs back home. His baritone voice and editorial choices shaped what Goff calls the “close harmony” of southern gospel.
Death, Burial, and How To Hear Him Today
Walbert’s life ended away from his Kentucky birthplace but not far from the world he had helped build. On December 2, 1959, he died in Birmingham, Alabama, reportedly of a stroke. The Tennessean’s obituary from the next day, “William Walbert, Song Writer, Dies,” places his death in a Birmingham hospital and explains that he would be returned to Lawrenceburg for services, emphasizing that he had been dean of the Vaughan School of Music since 1941 and that he was widely known as a gospel songwriter. An Associated Press wire story the same day, carried by papers such as the Kingsport Times, simply announced that a “gospel song writer” had died in Birmingham and noted that his career was bound up with the Vaughan company and its music school.
Burial records and Find A Grave memorials confirm that his body was laid to rest at Mimosa Cemetery in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. The cemetery now holds the graves of James D. Vaughan, members of the Vaughan family, Grace Mable Vaughan Walbert, and other figures linked to the music company. For visitors, it is one of the few physical sites where the Barren County born songwriter’s name appears carved in stone rather than printed at the bottom of a page of shaped notes.
Today, anyone who wants to hear Walbert’s legacy has several options. Hymnary’s indexed pages for Christian Choruses, Gospel Choruses, Crowning Harmony, and other Vaughan books provide scans of titles like “Glory Bound, Rejoicing,” “Abiding In His Love,” and “Where They Never Say Good-Bye,” complete with credits and copyright lines. The Hymn Studies blog entries on “Tell It Every Where You Go” and “What Is He Worth To Your Soul” blend close readings of the lyrics with compact biographical notes, making them useful near primary sources for both the songs and the man who composed their tunes.
Collectors and archives keep the recorded voice of the Vaughan Quartet accessible through digitized Victor 78s, while radio era Vaughan recordings highlight the piano work of his son Jim. Scholars like Goff and Montell offer context for how those records fit within the larger history of singing schools and the transition from amateur convention music to professional quartets.
For Appalachian historians, Walbert stands as a reminder that the region’s music history does not stop at folk ballads or coalfield protest songs. It also runs through the world of gospel songbooks, traveling singing school teachers, and shape note quartets that crisscrossed the hills between Barren County and Lawrenceburg. Every time a congregation opens a convention book and sings one of his choruses in four parts, they are keeping a Kentucky songwriter’s voice alive in the shape note harmonies he helped send out from a small Tennessee print shop.
Sources and further reading
Obituaries and memorials for William Burton Walbert, including “William Walbert, Song Writer, Dies,” The Tennessean, December 3, 1959, and Associated Press wire stories reprinted as “Gospel Song Writer Dies” in papers such as the Kingsport Times, as well as Find A Grave entries and Hymnary biographical notes that give his dates, parentage, burial at Mimosa Cemetery in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, and roles with the Vaughan School of Music.Hymnary+4Wikipedia+4Hymnary+4
Hymnary.org entries and page images for Christian Choruses (1936), Gospel Choruses (1939), Crowning Harmony (1941), and individual hymns and tunes such as “Glory Bound, Rejoicing,” “Abiding In His Love,” “Peace Like a River,” and “[There’s a home of rest for the good and blest],” which document Walbert’s work as author, composer, and copyright holder within the James D. Vaughan songbook series.Home+6Hymnary+6Hymnary+6
Hymn Studies blog posts on “Tell It Every Where You Go” and “What Is He Worth To Your Soul,” which provide compact biographical sketches of Walbert, including his birth near Fountain Run in Barren County, Kentucky, his studies at State Normal College and Dana’s Musical Institute, his marriage to Grace Mable Vaughan, his roles with various Vaughan quartets, his deanship of the Vaughan School of Music beginning in 1941, his editorship of Vaughan’s Family Visitor, and his death in Birmingham, Alabama.hymnstudiesblog+2hymnstudiesblog+2
Discography of American Historical Recordings entries for Victor matrices BVE 47144 (“When All Those Millions Sing”) and BVE 47146 (“Sunlight and Shadows”), which list W. B. Walbert as baritone vocalist with the Vaughan Quartet at an October 5, 1928, Nashville recording session, along with related Vaughan Quartet discographies and collector notes that trace his performance work onto 78 rpm discs and later radio era recordings.78 Discography+3EnglishLib+3facebook.com+3
James R. Goff Jr., Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), and “The Rise of Southern Gospel Music,” Church History 67, no. 4 (1998), which use Vaughan company records, microfilmed runs of Vaughan’s Family Visitor, and quartet discographies to place Walbert and his colleagues within the development of southern gospel publishing, singing schools, and professional quartets.arts.alabama.gov+1
William Lynwood Montell, Singing the Glory Down: Amateur Gospel Music in South Central Kentucky, 1900–1990 (University Press of Kentucky, 1991), along with summaries and bibliographic notices from CORE and Western Kentucky University, for context on the singing conventions, shape note practices, and local families of south central Kentucky that formed the wider environment in which Walbert’s Barren County upbringing and his later Vaughan work were rooted.TopScholar+2CORE+2
Tennessee House Joint Resolution 556 (2000) and U.S. Senate Resolution 170 (1999), which recognize Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, as the “Birthplace of Southern Gospel Music” and explicitly list William B. Walbert alongside James D. Vaughan, Adger M. Pace, James Rowe, and G. T. Speer as foundational southern gospel songwriters associated with the city, as well as Southern Gospel Music Association Hall of Fame listings that record Walbert’s 1999 induction.Tennessee General Assembly+2GovInfo+2