The Guiding Stars were the youth choir for Guiding Star Baptist Church. The hundred-plus voice choir was founded by Pastor S. T. Robinson. Vernida Goodner was nine years old when she became directress of The Guiding Stars, a position she held from 1959 to 1975. Ms. Goodner recalls that:
I kept telling my pastor, “I’m just a kid. I’m still in school. When I leave here I have to go home and do my homework.” And he said, “That’s okay. They’re kids, too.” I could only direct that choir because I was raised by Sonocia Harris. She taught me. She kept me busy. She knew I had a talent. She told me that when I was a baby, she’d hold group rehearsals in our one-bedroom apartment in Beecher Terrace. She said, “What was amazing is that you were asleep when we were rehearsing, but when you woke up, you could sing the songs.” I took piano lessons, and I didn't have to worry about voice because I could sing. By the time I started directing choirs, I could teach the parts without a piano because I could hear the parts: alto, soprano, bass, tenor.
When I was nineteen our pastor at Guiding Star said, “I have got to get this choir recorded. I just have to.” So he set it all up and the Guiding Stars went out to Allen and Martin Studios out in Jeffersontown. It was all the choir members, over a hundred of them. And these white guys at the studio were astonished because there were a hundred Black kids singing like that with another kid directing them. They’d never seen anything like that before.
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