I’m Glad About It – GardenRant

I have had epiphanies in parks around the world, and, more than once, I have been blessed in the Gospel Tent at The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. I am glad about it. There is a bridge between the legacies of Louisville’s Olmsted-designed parks and the city’s rich history of Black gospel music that, until this year, I knew precious little about besides spending a lot of time in parks and occasionally tuning to radio stations WLOU and WLLV: “More Power. More Praise.”

“Joy is an unlikely response to white supremacy but a necessary one, a mental health protecting and soul saving response. Joy is what a white person first notices when he walks into a black church. Yeah, because let me tell you, in my white church it did not look like joy.”

 –John Borders, Louisville Urban League Board Vice Chair, at last week’s MISSION: POSSIBLE Annual Report Luncheon

The Louisville Story Program, co-founded by Darcy Thompson and Joe Manning, helped shine a providential light on my hometown with the recently released 204-page book, and 4 CD musical box set of 83 songs, called I’m Glad About it: The Legacy of Gospel Music in Louisville 1958-1981. 1,000 individual songs are available on the LSP website. Take a look here:

I know the 17 Olmsted Parks and six Parkways, but there is much about my hometown that I don’t and should know. Louisville Story Program has introduced me to people and neighborhoods through their ten previous books, all authored by story participants. In their latest rollout they introduced me to people who knew local gospel music best—preachers, singers, organists, teachers, record producers, family members and church congregants.

I’m glad about it.

So how much does Joe Manning know about our Olmsted Parks? Quite a bit. Joe and his family live two minutes from Olmsted-designed Iroquois Park. And previously he spent five formative years, from 2007-2012, on a field crew of the Olmsted Parks Conservancy clearing bush honeysuckle and other invasives, planting trees as well as running volunteer events. “I was covered in all manner of filth—oil, sweat and grime,” Joe said.

Louisville’s Olmsted Parks Conservancy

The Olmsted Parks Conservancy held their annual meeting at the Iroquois Park amphitheater in early November. Conservancy members gathered to visit with staff, discuss parks projects and strategic plans. Joe Manning, Deputy Director of the Louisville Story Program, gave the keynote address which was titled “Growing Into Our Parks.”

“I was drifting through the world… extending my adolescence beyond its natural durability doing some landscape gardening playing a lot of music, and even from this vantage I now recognize that what I needed was an unambiguous endeavor. I wanted to create a sense of purpose…It meant a lot to me working on that crew.

“The Conservancy is imagining and restoring Olmsted’s work so that we can come into these places of sanctuary and absorb the real genius of design which goes beyond landscape architecture and into the social sciences. These are places of communion and individual reflection,” Joe summarized in his Iroquois Park talk.

“I can’t think of but one or two of our eleven books that don’t include somebody ruminating, intensively, on the ways of the parks that have influenced their lives…

“I think of my friend Derek Pressley who could be considered the mayor of Elliott Park. His chapter in our last book, “If You Write Me a Letter, Send It Here,” is a love letter to Elliott Park. His love jumps off the page.

“The Olmsted field crew job and the Louisville Story Program are the two jobs I’ve had as an adult that mean the most to me and that have affected me and changed me the most, and they overlap.

“So, what I’ve learned in the past eleven years in my time interviewing folks in the community is that we’re all working with the same tools when we are creating meaning in our lives and mostly it’s the stories we tell ourselves, and our community, about how we got here. My wife Savannah always says the shortest distance between two people is a story and when is that understanding more potent and meaningful than in a time like right now.”

Louisville’s Gospel Garden of Love

I have felt God’s grace while watching thick buds of a yellow buckeye spiral and unfurl in Cherokee Park in April. And I have been transported by Aaron Neville singing on Sunday with the Zion Harmonizers at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

And now I have been surprised and moved by the depth, quality, and joy of gospel recordings uncovered during the three-year project leading up to this year’s release of I’m Glad About It.

I found a garden of love when I turned the pages of, I’m Glad About It for the first time. I have returned to the book, and recordings, for inspiration again and again.

The First Lady of Grace Gospel Records wrote,“Louisville is like a musical garden. The soil here in Louisville is so rich.”

-Wilma Clayborn, author

“Louisville was known to be very talented. The local groups and choirs had mastered their music in such a way that when professional groups came to town, the local talent ran them back where they came from… Reverend Calloway didn’t want any dead music, and he would say it: Don’t bring nothin’ dead in here.”

-Rev. Della Porter, author

“Reverend Calloway brought Black gospel to the forefront of the service…The musicians knew how to add a funk and soul aspect to gospel…So you can go home and listen to Stevie Wonder and Al Green, and when you come to church, we ain’t gonna worry about what’s secular and what’s not. If we’re gonna jam, we’re gonna jam.”

-Ben Jones, author

When the book was in the can and off to the printers, Louisville Story Program turned its attention toward plans for a live performance to celebrate the book and CD release. Three months of preparation were needed to coordinate 125 performers going on and coming off the stage. A video narrated by the Reverend Della Porter, introducing each act was interspersed between the performances. The Brown Theatre was packed in late September. You could feel the love.

On the stage of the Iroquois Park Amphitheatre, Joe explained how the Louisville Story Program works.

“It’s interesting, with all our books, we introduce ourselves to members of the community, we make friends, and we develop these durable and long-lasting relationships. They must start somewhere, you’ve got to know knock on somebody’s door and say we’ve got this idea that we want to talk to you about it’s going to take forever you’re not going to believe it and then three years later people are able to hold a book in their hands and see the fruits of all their work.”

I went downtown on Saturday before Thanksgiving to hear a panel discussion of a few of the authors of “I’m Glad About It.” Joe Manning emceed and said, as if anyone in the audience needed to be reminded, “Louisville punches above its weight in the gospel world.”

“Thank you to Bishop Butler’s son, Lamont Butler, who, for over 40 years, preserved the original two-inch quadruplex videotape reels comprising about ten hours of video footage from his father’s gospel variety show Lifting Jesus. In 2022, Lamont partnered with the Louisville Story Program to digitize those reels and archive the priceless cultural heritage he’d saved all those years.”

Lamont Butler said he didn’t have a clue who Joe Manning was when he first called.

Reverend Della Porter said Joe and Darcy brought Louisville’s gospel history together.

The authors, and the audience repeatedly, and enthusiastically, acknowledged their gratitude for Joe Manning and Darcy Thompson.

Joy and love.

You could feel it.

I’m glad about it.