Over the past three years, Louisville Story Program staff have spent time speaking with elders from the local gospel groups from the 50s, 60s and 70s.
That has culminated in “I’m Glad About It: The Legacy of Gospel Music in Louisville,” a digital archive of music with 1,000 pieces of music from 125 Louisville gospel groups.
“From that collection… we took 83 songs and had them remastered by a Grammy-nominated archival engineer and created a four CD box set,” said Louisville Story Program deputy director Joe Manning.
Manning said preserving history was one of the main goals of the project.
“We've always known that there's this really rich tradition of gospel music, but finding those recordings, like any cultural material, it's getting lost,” Manning said. “So tracking this stuff down and preserving it is one of the aims of the project, and we were able to do that.”
“I’m Glad About It” also features a 200-page book with first-person narratives from people who were involved in the gospel scene between 1958 through 1981. The box set releases Sept. 28 with a special program on to celebrate.
For those the Louisville Story Program interviewed, recalling their gospel group days have brought back a flood of memories.
“It has been awesome, because I've done some interviews, but every time I do one after, when I'm thinking about it afterward I think, ‘Oh, I forgot, you know, I forgot this, or I forgot that,’ or, you know, various stages in my singing, events, situations, travels,” said Rev. Della Porter, who had a huge presence in the gospel scene at the time.
Porter sang with several groups in Louisville before a call ministry pulled her to preach instead. She said the gospel scene has changed vastly since she was involved.
“Now it seems so quiet,” Porter said. “Our typical Sunday back then was to go to our home church and probably sing in the choir. …And then we would go eat somewhere, and then we would find where the programs were that day, and singers kind of came together.”
Porter said the gospel community at the time was deeply connected. Groups supported one another.
“We were a unity body, even though we weren't of the same, same singing group, if your alto wasn't there, then somebody from our group got up sung alto with you, because we were around one another so much that we kind of knew the songs that other groups were singing,” Porter said.
The project gave Porter a chance to reconnect with people she knew during her time singing. People like Wilma “Rita West” Clayborn.
Clayborn sang in gospel groups, but she also was a driving force in recording and archiving the singing groups of the time with Grace Gospel Records.
She has groups come to local studios to record their songs and press them into vinyl to be sold at her and husband’s record store.
She said she created the record label and store so there was space to preserve and sell gospel music in Louisville.
“I think history is important, and we need to know,” Clayborn said. “Even the people that are singing now don't know the history that we've written about and that we have recorded. My grandchildren, great grandchildren, say to me, ‘Nana, you did that way, but I didn't know that.’”
Clayborn has made a practice of telling the history of gospel music and gospel music in Louisville specifically.
“I don't know what makes me want to do it. I just do it. I enjoy it,” Clayborn said. “I was glad to get this done because it helped to put the gospel music scene on record, on the table of the industry, much more than anybody else had done.”
Correction: A previous version of this story listed an incorrect title for Joe Manning.
