"Music That Will Touch Your Heart"

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About Laura Praise Records

Here's the story of how Laura Praise Records came to be.

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In 2005, Laura entered her piano students in the Clavinova Festival, sponsored by Mississippi Music, the local Clavinova dealer. One of the perqs of entering her students in the festival was that Laura got the loan of a top-of-the-line Clavinova, in her home studio.

For those of you who don't know it, a Clavinova is a very high quality Yamaha electronic keyboard, used by many churches to replace piano, organ, and sometimes an entire orchestra.

After the festival, the Clavinova representative at Mississippi Music just left the Clavinova at Laura's house. Laura wondered if he'd forgotten (but he hadn't - he was very smart; more on that in a bit).

One of the capabilities of the Clavinova is that it will let you record what you play.

Laura, as you know by now, loves to arrange music. Her mother calls her arrangements "Music a la Laura" and she loves to hear them as much as we all do.

Laura had several arrangements of Christmas tunes she had worked up over the years, and she figured that while she had that Clavinova in her house, it would be a great chance to record them, and she better do it quick, before they came to get their Clavinova back.

So she recorded ten of her arrangements, and made copies of the CD to give to a few of her friends at church (Crossgates Baptist Church in Brandon, MS).

Meanwhile, there was some personnel shuffling at the music store, and the person who placed the Clavinova in Laura's house went on a sabbatical. The powers-that-be at the store didn't understand what was going on. They saw the Clavinova was at Laura's house, but it was still being carried on their inventory. So they made Laura a deal - they offered to sell it to her at a significant discount, and let her make payments on it to the store. That way she could keep it, they could get paid for it, and everyone would be happy.

Well, not everyone.

Laura and her husband Harry are very diligent about budgeting, and this new payment didn't fit into the budget. Laura said, "Oh, no problem. I'll just take on a few more playing gigs and make enough money to make the payments."

Excuse me?

Here she is, mother of four children, teaching them all in home school, with nearly a full time job playing for the church, and another full time job teaching piano students, and she's going to take on more so she could make these payments?

It was a definite challenge, and she simply trusted in the Lord to provide.

And He did.

One of the friends who was lucky enough to get one of the Christmas CDs was David Miller, a Horn player in the Crossgates orchestra. David had home schooled his kids, and he chatted with Laura several times about home schooling, about bringing kids up right, and about the financial challenges of the extra payment for the Clavinova.

David says, "When I heard this CD, my jaw dropped open. I've been in music many more years than I care to remember, and I've heard a lot of it, good stuff, bad stuff, awful stuff, and excellent stuff. This stuff of Laura's wasn't excellent, it was outstanding.

"The first coherent thought I had after listening to that first CD was - There are hundreds of people out there, probably thousands, even millions, paying good money for music that's nowhere nearly this good!

"My second coherent thought was, This CD is so good, I bet we could sell enough copies of it to help Laura PAY for that Clavinova!"

So David asked Laura if she'd be interested in that, and she said yes, and it took them nearly two years to put together enough tunes, with acceptable quality, to assemble into the Christmas PraiseCD.

One of Laura's good friends is graphic artist Barbara Hudson, who did such a magnificent job with all the artwork on the CD package and posters. By the way, Barbara is available for other work as well. We are currently in the process of putting a web site up for her. Meantime, if you have some work for Barbara, just send us an inquiry on our CONTACT page.

Things came together fairly quickly after that, and we released the CD in mid-October.

As we said above, the Lord did come through. In just two and a half months, over 700 copies of Christmas Praise were sold, solely through word-of-mouth advertising, and with the help of some other amazing blessings, we were able to pay off ALL THE REMAINDER OWED ON THE CLAVINOVA.

God Is Good.

All The Time.

And now, it's pretty obvious to all of us that not only has God blessed this venture, it's probably a good thing to continue on with.

Therefore, we have plans, sometime in the future as the demands of life and work and family permit, to produce more CDs. We have more than half the tunes identified for the next CD, but there's no telling when it will be ready. We'll keep you posted.

There's also the possibility of starting a ministry through Laura Praise Records (see the Ministry page), and many other exciting possibilities as well.

And now, as our friend Paul Harvey would say, you know the rest of the story.