Vinyl Digest: Gospel Soul

Between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s, gospel music absorbed everything happening around it - soul, funk, disco, boogie - and split the church in two. Elders called it the devil's music. A younger generation made some of the most emotionally direct records of the era, and pressed most of them in runs of fifty. Gospel Soul is the first book to treat that music as a genre with a timeline, a geography and a canon. DJ and compiler Greg Belson - who has been digging for these records since 1995 - selects four hundred titles across seven chapters, from ten-dollar finds to four-hundred-dollar grails, each with a rarity score and a checkbox for records still on the want list. Twenty-three of the world's leading collectors and selectors contribute lists of their own, including Gilles Peterson, Rich Medina, Wayne Hemingway and Palms Trax.