Stamps-Baxter Music Company

The Stamps-Baxter Music Company was an influential southern music publishing company in the shape note gospel field. Virgil Oliver Stamps founded the company in 1924 and J. R. Baxter Jr. joined him to form the Stamps-Baxter Music Company, which was based in Dallas, Texas, with offices in Chattanooga, Tennessee and Pangburn, Arkansas. Stamps got his start working for the James D. Vaughan Publishing Company from which he got many of his business ideas.

Stamps and Baxter operated a music school which was the primary source of the thousands of gospel songs they published. The company issued several paperback publications each year with cheap binding and printed on cheap paper. Thus, the older books are now in delicate condition. These songbooks were used in church singing events, called "conventions," as well as at other church events, although they did not take the place of regular hymnals. Among the country music and bluegrass "standards" that were first published by Stamps-Baxter are "Rank Strangers to Me", "Just a Little Talk With Jesus", "Precious Memories", "Farther Along", "If We Never Meet Again", "Victory in Jesus", and "I Won't Have to Cross Jordan Alone".

Another major part of the corporation was its sponsorship of gospel quartets who sang the company's music in churches throughout the southern United States. At the end of World War II they were sponsoring 35 such quartets. The company also had a quartet who sang on radio station KRLD in Dallas, beginning in 1936. This station would boost its transmitting power at midnight, so that it could be heard across the nation. An additional part of the Stamps-Baxter music empire was a magazine, Gospel Music News. Each part of the corporation supported every other part, giving strength to the entire organization.

In 1945, Frank Stamps, younger brother of V. O. Stamps, left the organization to form the rival Stamps Quartet Music Company. At the same time a number of quartets left Stamps-Baxter resulting in the end of the company’s quartet sponsorship coinciding with the end of the war. Frank’s defection did not hurt the Stamps-Baxter company in the long run, although it did lead to some confusion among the public. The Stamps-Baxter School of Music declined after World War II, but its successor continues to this day as an annual two-week summer workshop under the leadership of Ben Speer.

Stamps died in 1940, leaving the company to J. R. Baxter. After Baxter died in 1960, his widow, Clarice Howard "Ma" Baxter, ran the company until her death in 1972. In 1974, the company was sold to Zondervan, which became part of the Benson Company in 1986.