4. Various ArtistsI’m Glad About It: The Legacy Of Gospel Music in Louisville

When I first started recording music, in the summer of 1991 or 1992, there was an African Methodist evangelical church near where my friend Todd Brashear lived, who played bass in Slint, so I thought, oh, well, maybe I’ll just go to church one day. It absolutely changed my musical life. This was in a relatively small college town, Bloomington, Indiana, and I thought, if it’s happening here, I bet it’s happening in Louisville, and indeed it was. You could pick a different church every Sunday and go and see music that was better than anything you would see in any dingy bar on a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday or Saturday night. You’d be experiencing an engagement on the part of the congregation that was something to be hoped for and strived for. I remember the first show that I went to after the pandemic was a gospel show – I remember feeling the top of my skull, desperately holding on to it, so it wouldn’t blow to the ceiling of the room that we were in, because the music was so amazing.

It wasn’t as easy to find Louisville gospel on a record before this compilation, because none of it was really digitised, then this great institution here called the Louisville Story Program collected it and released it. There’s a best of, on vinyl, under one record, but the CDs have everything. I couldn’t believe what they found. It’s absolutely world class music that is just brilliant and beautiful.