Gospel Music Store an Uplifting Experience for Visitors, Owner

When Cecil Martin opened The Praise Experience, a gospel record and tape store, she feared that running the small business would take time away from her street ministry.

She needn’t have worried.

Since opening shop at 1357 N. Lake Ave., Martin, 51, said customers, strangers and even street people have looked to her for spiritual comfort.

“I’ve been able to touch the lives of my customers,” the soft-voiced Martin said, unconsciously stretching her hand outward. “I’ve been able to pray with a lot of people right across my counter.”

As an illustration, she told of the time a well-dressed man entered, obviously distressed, and asked for a specific recording. When Martin told him she didn’t have the record and apologized, the man confided that he needed the music to comfort himself. His wife had died the day before.

“I told him, ‘I know you’re a man and all, and you have to be macho, but it’s all right to cry,’ ” Martin said. “He just started sobbing. I wanted to put my arms around him, but I said, ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll just stand here and whisper a prayer for you.’ ”

When it was over, Martin said the man thanked her, telling her that before he entered the shop he had been so overcome with grief that he didn’t know how he would carry on.

“It’s those kinds of stories that I could give, on and on,” Martin said. “I don’t know why. It’s something about me.”

Such occurrences have made The Praise Experience an apt name. But in between, Martin does manage to sell a few records and tapes from her “totally gospel” store. With the demise last year of an Altadena gospel record store, Martin said her 3-year-old shop is the only such specialty store in the San Gabriel Valley.

From her spot at the rear of the store, where a battered refrigerator and small black-and-white TV set have been installed, Martin passes her afternoons, greeting customers in an almost girlish voice. Framed pictures for sale of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. adorn the wall along with record posters and T-shirts reading, “Attention! All parties in Hell have been canceled because of fire. No exit doors available.”

To browse through the record bins in the small shop is to take an intensive course in gospel musicology. Old-style gospel male quartets and groups from the 1950s and 1960s are represented in recordings by the Gospel Keynotes, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Jackson Southernairs), the Soul Stirrers and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi.

Choir recordings of traditional gospel songs are available from Mississippi Mass, the Edwin Hawkins group, choirs from New Jersey and Los Angeles churches, L.A. Mass and Martin’s own church, West Angeles Church of God in Christ.

Also available are contemporary gospel recordings such as those by Beau Williams, the Clark Sisters, the Winans and Commissioned. Martin even stocks the rap gospel of Soldiers for Christ and the hip, jazzy a cappella recordings of Take 6.

She admitted, however, that “I’ve listened to Take 6, but I don’t get it.” And she lamented: “The gospel music where I come from has sort of been put aside or put on hold. We’re getting away from that sound, the music that has the spirit that will move you.”

Because of the popularity of the contemporary gospel style, Martin said, old recordings of Mahalia Jackson and the Clara Ward Singers are hard to come by. But she keeps a list of customers who desire such music and notifies them when she finds the records.

The shop draws customers from San Gabriel Valley cities such as Monrovia and Duarte, and from as far away as Orange County and San Diego. In addition, Martin said, she corresponds with mail-order customers from Anaheim and Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Martin, who lives in Altadena, entered the record store business with no previous retail experience. She had planned to open a used-clothing store, but when obstacle after obstacle reared up, she said she decided to let God show her the way. After prayer, the idea for a record store came to her, and she promptly went into business with her daughter Mari Martin as a co-owner. And everything fell into place.

“Things started to unfold for me, and nothing had unfolded for me before,” she said. “It seemed the more I prayed, the more the Lord put the seal on it.”

Such talk is second nature to Martin, the daughter of a Methodist minister from Texas. In her youth, Martin said, secular music was not allowed within earshot of her father. The family set aside Sunday only for worship. Sunday’s church clothes were ironed the night before, and Sunday dinner was prepared on Saturday.

“You’d go to church, come home, eat and go back to church again,” she said.

Martin continued her devotion into adulthood by singing in church choirs and participating in church activities and street ministries. The gospel record store, which Martin said has not yet become a real money maker, is yet another expression of that devotion.

Said Martin: “I’m here for the glory of God and any way I can lift up his name or glorify his name, because he’s my all in all.”