Additional live recordings of the Gospel Singing Baxter Family will be added to this page in the coming days.

Plus you can now, also, listen to live recordings of many other Rockford, Illinois area gospel singers between 1967 and 1970 at these same events.

At Christmas in 1966 fifteen year old Roger Baxter, a cousin of the younger members of the Gospel Singing Baxter Family, was given a tape recorder by his father, Johnie Baxter (oldest brother of R.V. Baxter). These recordings are some of his first attempts at recording live performances ... and the original quality reflects his amateur efforts. But now, even though these old quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape recordings have seen a half century of use including breaks and lost sections, they provide us with the sounds of some forgotten memories of live performances by the Baxter Family from so long ago.

These recordings were originally made about 50 years ago during live performances in various churches and school auditoriums by the R.V. and Betty Baxter family of Rockford, Illinois, at a time when their young voices were just developing. They have all of the inherent defects found in live performances like crowd noises, forgotten song titles, missed entrance cues, and babies crying (possibly even young Paula who was amazingly content at being cared for by her Uncle Johnie Baxter during part of the January concert).

Note the difference in the maturity of their young voices and the professionalism in their performance that occurred in just the few years between the concert recordings in these examples.

And, since these recordings were originally created by a young amateur "recording engineer" just learning how things should be done, they suffer from poorly placed microphones, too frequent over modulation and distortion, and the use of whatever cobbled together sound systems that might happen to be in use at the various locations.

At the time no one could have dreamed of these recordings one day being used as archival recordings that have now been made publicly available world-wide on the Internet. So while great care has been taken to attempt to restore the audio you hear now to the original lustre of the live performances, you will still be able to detect some of those recording defects, channel cross-talk, and tape hiss that are a part of these old recordings.

Lori, the oldest daughter of The Baxter Family but who was just 5 years old at the time of these recordings, says of these newly released digital audio reproductions of their live performances:

"The memories just flooded back and the tears flooded my eyes as I listened to these live performances. It was so wonderful to hear Dad and Mom's voices. The boys voices were still maturing but I still know them by heart. Amazing, but this time in our lives seems like yesterday to me."

And Rick, the eldest son in this family group, says:

"I am still reeling with the emotion of recalling the day these recordings were made! There were tears as I listened! I can see the church and recall the excitement of that performance! "

So we invite you to join us as we travel back in time to once again listen to the sounds of The Gospel Singing Baxter Family recorded live in concert. We hope that you enjoy listening to them and that good memories will come flooding back to you ... and that while you listen to these beautiful young voices from long ago the messages of the songs will touch your heart as well!

Enjoy all of the Baxter Family albums now made available online.

You can also choose individually from any of these vintage Baxter Family albums:
And these recordings - one album and one single - are of secular songs featuring the three Baxter boys (Rick, Mark, and Duncan) which, although were more limited in their original release, are well worth a listen.
You can also listen to some of the forgotten and never before released early recordings of LIVE performances.

* NOTE: To make the audio playback on this webpage as universal as possible it utilizes
to play generic MP3 audio files which should work on the following web browsers:

• Windows: Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, IE6, IE7, IE8, IE9
• OSX: Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera
• iOS: Mobile Safari: iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
• Android: Android 2.3 Browser
• Blackberry: OS 7 Phone Browser, PlayBook Browser