I'm So Glad: Kansas City And The Roots Of Black Gospel Music, The Untold Story

I am a journalist and also a musician who performs music within the genre known as Americana. A lot of the music my family likes to perform is gospel, and we sing both in public venues and in churches. Through friends in the Kansas City, MO urban community we were invited to sing at traditional “musicals” at predominantly Black churches. To say the least, we were emotionally blown away by the energy and sound of Kansas City’s gritty Black gospel blues. The singing was great, but our response was more emphatically triggered by the collective spirit that seemed to resonate through the room, a feeling that for the moment all is well, that all of our troubles were in the hands of a higher power and that, like the old Negro Spiritual, “trouble don’t last always.”

The experience prompted two major reactions on our part. One, we wanted to record the music to share, especially because many of the regional singers were aging and we feared that their traditional form of gospel singing would be lost. But more than that, we wanted to learn where this singularly personal music came from, and why we didn’t know more about the Black gospel music that appeared to have originated right here in Kansas City. My instincts as a journalist and lover of history kicked in. And the quest that began nearly 10 years ago resulted in our documentary, “I’m So Glad: Kansas City and The Roots of Black Gospel Music, The Untold Story.”

It became apparent that the conventional history of Black gospel music, failed to account for a key component of the true narrative. Yes, Black gospel developed from the spirituals, just as jazz and blues had. Yes, the great migration in the early 20th Century accounted for a more downhome sound in Chicago’s urban churches. But another compelling history existed in the movement of African Americans to Kansas, and later Kansas City, MO and Kansas City, KS. Our exciting and historically disruptive findings motivated us to tell this other story, one that had not been told before, until now.
What emerged was a story that began in pre-Civil War times when the nation was engaged in the defining debate over whether slavery would be expanded west of the Missouri River into Kansas. Free State advocates established a foot-hold in Kansas by founding the free-port town of Quindaro, to bring supplies to abolitionists engaged in bloody skirmishes with Missouri’s pro-slavery forces. Quindaro became the far-western station on the Underground Railroad, associated with the extremist John Brown, who became a Moses figure to escaped slaves. Kansas’ Free-State reputation was a lure for more than 40,000 more African Americans who trekked north in 1879 to flee the failure of Reconstruction, in what was the largest ethnic migration in the United States to that time. These Blacks streaming into Kansas brought with them their desire for a new life, a commitment to education and their music, which was the backbone of the Black church.

Assisted by white abolitionists, they built communities that included schools. And they formed music groups. And held concerts. Assisted by the state of Kansas, the African Methodist Episcopal church founded Western University in Quindaro. It was the first Black college west of the Mississippi River. Graduates of the popular music department not only carried the spirituals and gospel music across the nation, but also became instrumental in ushering traditionally Black music into the mainstream culture and into the arts and entertainment industries. Western alumni were some of the first composers, performers and conductors to arrange the spirituals, to found musical organizations that encouraged Black artists, to publish sheet music of gospel music, and also to influence the music on the Broadway stage and in Hollywood.

The traditional Black gospel music that came out of Kansas mixed with the jazz and blues developing in Kansas City’s 18th & Vine district to create a new sound, which was carried to Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Our research took us to museums, libraries and archives north and east. We took the research and recordings we had gathered to the nation’s top musicologists who agreed, that an influential but over-looked component in the story of Black gospel needed to be shared with the public. By then, we had amassed hundreds of hours of recordings, interviews and video. Not only did we face the daunting task of convincing scholars, historians and musicologists that important musical history had been long ignored, but we had to wade through a sea of documentation to tell a persuasive story without getting lost in the details. And to make it even harder, we had begun this journey before the advent of modern HD digital video, setting up our SD cameras in small urban church pews. Further, some of our archival film dated to the 1920s. And some of the recordings were also old and unpolished.

We made the decision that our priority was to tell a compelling and historically true story, one that would shed new light on the Black experience and contribute to an awareness of the inimitable diversity of American culture. Our goal, however, was not to just tell a Black story or to just relate a history lesson, but to explore a singularly American story. Working with a limited budget that relied largely on grants, we endeavored to fashion old and new technologies to develop a narrative that balanced the history with the music and create a journey of discovery for viewers that expressed the same sense of wonder that we first experienced in Kansas City’s urban churches.