The Eureka Publishing Company provided gospel music to the Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas region where the seven-shape notation system was widely adopted by the mid-1880s. This volume is an early version of the gospel annual. It retains rudiments from its oblong predecessors, rendering it suitable for both class instruction and convention singing, while also featuring a slate of new compositions published annually and promoted in singing schools and conventions. Like many publishers active in the western territories, Eureka Publishing Company had strong institutional ties to white gospel’s historical geography. President Stephen Jesse Oslin (1858–1928) was an Alabama native before moving to Oklahoma where he died in 1928. The westward movement of composers and publishers like Oslin helped spread the seven-shape system and its teaching and publishing models from the eastern United States to Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and beyond. Oslin’s Eureka Harmony Method (1910) remains in use in some contemporary singing schools.

—Erin Fulton