James D. Vaughan, born in Giles County on December 14, 1864, was a singing-school teacher who moved to Texas, came home after a tornado, and in 1903 founded the James D. Vaughan Publishing Company in Lawrenceburg. Over the next six years it averaged sales of about sixty thousand songbooks a month. The books used shape notes, a system that gives each note of the scale its own shape so that people who could not read music could learn to sing parts.
His best idea was the traveling quartet. In 1910 Vaughan hired four male singers to tour churches and singing schools and sell his books, and the first engagement sold five thousand songbooks to a crowd of fifteen hundred. Within a few years he had sixteen quartets on the road, a monthly newsletter, the Vaughan Family Visitor, and a school of music. In November 1922 he bought WOAN, the first commercially licensed radio station in Tennessee, and its broadcasts reached listeners as far away as Canada. By his death in 1941 he had written more than five hundred songs and sold over six million songbooks.
The museum is on the third floor of the Vaughan Municipal Building on the square. The Leoma Music Company in the county has kept publishing shape-note books, and a James D. Vaughan Quartet Festival is held in town.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour