In the mid-nineteenth century, Georgia did not have a music publishing infrastructure to support composers like rural east Georgia’s William Clarke Hauser (1812–80) who turned to mid-Atlantic and northeastern companies to publish and print collections of sacred music. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, regions of Georgia would emerge as hotbeds for music education, composition, and publication. Influential gospel composer-publishers J. B. Vaughan (1862–1918), R. M. McIntosh (1836–99), and Charlie D. Tillman (1861–1943) all set up shop in rapidly growing Atlanta by the turn of the twentieth century. The small city of Dalton, Georgia, a textile manufacturing center in the northwest corner of the state, would enjoy a substantial share of the southern sacred music market after Anthony Johnson Showalter (1858–1924) founded his influential publishing company there in 1884. A. J. Showalter & Co. would grow to include a network of regional offices that offered training and employment to musicians and composers across the Southeast.

—Erin Fulton