Someone in Tucson made this gospel record, and there's almost no trace of them

New Joy. Gospel funk soul. Lighthouse Records. Tucson, Arizona. 1987.

A Black church band that booked studio time, wrote their own songs, pressed their own vinyl, and put it into the world on their own terms.

I've searched everywhere and there is almost nothing about them online. Felix Gilbert wrote most of the music and signed the liner notes to his wife Kotane and his son Gerald. He wrote: together we stand divided we fall. If we let the Lord lead and we follow we can never go wrong.

I found this in Tempe, Arizona.

I posted it on Juneteenth this year. As a Canadian I hear about American holidays but don't always understand the full weight of them, so I took a moment to understand this one properly.

On June 19, 1865, more than two years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced that more than 250,000 enslaved Black people in Texas were free. Enslaved people were deliberately kept from information, and in Texas, far from Union control, slaveholders had every reason to hide the truth. Until soldiers arrived with the power to enforce it, freedom existed in law but not in life.

I thought about that when I pulled this record out. The freedom to make something and sign your name to it feels connected to what that day represents.

This record deserves to exist somewhere in the internet record. If you know anything about New Joy or anyone connected to this album, I'd love to hear it.