Vintage Harding Records Find a New Life in the Bookstore

In 1998, when the Donald W. Reynolds Center for Music and Communication was built, singing groups that used to practice and record in the Claud Rogers Lee Building made the transition to the new recording studio in the Reynolds building, but they left a few thousand albums behind.

The old Lee Building recording studio, which is now where students pick up their textbooks at the beginning of each semester, had no use for the stage. As the decision was made and the process of tearing it down began, workers were surprised to find stacks of Harding record albums dating back to the ‘60’s piled beneath the stage.

“They were just out of sight, out of mind,” Dr. Travis Thompson said. “A lot of the people who had put them there had retired, so that’s why it was sort of a discovery.”

Dr. Thompson has been teaching mathematics at Harding since 1985. He remembers when the albums were found and when they were moved upstairs to be stored in a small practice room.

“People are rediscovering vinyl now, so I thought it would be a good time to bring them out,” Travis said. “I would say that they found a new life at the bookstore.”

In December, Travis called Josh Picker, who works in the bookstore, to see if he’d be interested in the albums.

“It took me a week to go back and forth to my car and go through everything to find out how many different albums there were,” Picker said.

There are 13 different albums and around 3,000 total. He has been packaging them to send to whoever wants to buy them. Albums include popularly requested Harding favorites, hymns, contemporary wedding music and more from the Harding Chorale and Harding College A Capella Chorus. What old favorites do you remember from your time at Harding? Make a visit to the bookstore to check out the albums for yourself and purchase a special piece of Harding history.