Skylite
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Skylite is a gospel label started by The Statesmen quartet and Blackwood Brothers somewhere around 1958 or 1959. It was one of the first, if not the first, Gospel labels. The Blackwood Brothers, the Statesmen Quartet, Speer Family, Oak Ridge Quartet and many others recorded on it.
These recordings did not have the budgets as the ones on RCA, Heart Warming or Canaan, but the Blackwood Brothers and the Statesmen quartet did want to produce quality records and were willing to invest money in the recordings to do so. Ben Speer produced some albums and Brock Speer produced most of the albums there for some time. Later Joel Gentry did as well. Joel Gentry eventually bought the company.
With the popularity The Oak Ridge Boys (specifically when they switched to country and had a monster hit with Elvira), many compilations were made with some of the material from their Skylite recordings. Even though Oaks baritone, William Lee Golden only appeared on two Skylite recordings, and Oaks lead, Duane Allen only appeared on part of one, and Oaks bass, Richard Sterban and Oaks tenor, Joe Bonsall appeared on none of these, these covers often showed the current group. This is still done with CD's today, but many may not use the masters. Nonetheless, often the same songs are rehashed over several recordings while many others from this era are ignored.
At some point, the Sing label (owned by the LeFevres) was bought and I believe merged with Skylite as Skylite-Sing. It is rumored that some or all of the Skylite masters were destroyed in a fire.
