Launch Concert September 28, 2024

Posted on May 15, 2024

Saturday, September 28, 2024!

Louisville Story Program and Kentucky Performing Arts present a celebration of Louisville’s gospel music heritage featuring luminaries from some of the city’s most talented choirs and quartets, as well as archival performances drawn from the Louisville Gospel Music Archives. This-once-in-a-lifetime musical review marks the release of I’m Glad About It, a 4CD box set and hardbound documentary book, authored by the gospel elders who lived the legacy of Louisville’s gospel music from the vinyl era.

Louisville Gospel Choral Union Community Choir, St. Stephen Mass Choir, The Pimpleton Singers, Archie Dale & The Tones of Joy, The Religious Five, The Gospel Voices of Soul, God's Girls, The Praying Hands Quartette, and more!

Get Tickets

Pre-Order the Box Set and Double LP

In the decades following WWII, small recording studios, and record labels documented an incredibly robust musical moment in Louisville. The 45s, albums, and television programs produced by Louisville’s gospel community captured the sound and spirit of their time, but these artifacts of the city’s musical heritage are being lost and thrown away at an alarming rate.

In an effort to preserve the city’s gospel legacy, the Louisville Story Program organized the community-led Gospel Restoration Project. Guided by a committee of local gospel elders, the Louisville Story Program has located and preserved 1,000 individual songs from over 125 Louisville-based recording artists from 1958-1981. The music is now preserved in a free, searchable online archive of music and ephemera.

Eighty-three of these songs have been restored and remastered for I’m Glad About It, a four-CD box set, accompanied by a 208-page, hardbound documentary book of first-person narratives by members of the gospel community who have documented Louisville's gospel music heritage in their own words. The resulting community-led public history is a chronicle of Louisville’s gospel music legacy by the people who created and lived it.

Join us on Sept. 28 at the Brown Theatre as Louisville Story Program and Kentucky Performing Arts present a once-in-a-lifetime musical review of gospel luminaries from Louisville’s choirs and quartets to mark the release of I’m Glad About It.

Learn more about the project.