HARLEM GOSPEL TRAVELERS are coming to Muncie! Join us for the SECOND FREE CONCERT of the 2025 Muncie Three Trails Music Series on Friday, June 13th at 7:00pm at Canan Commons in Downtown Muncie! We are excited for this show and for special guest opener Doc Peterson and the Little Chicago Band! This concert is sponsored by Defur Voran, thank you!
🎼 Explore the Trails, Enjoy the Music! 🎶
“Gospel’s at the root of everything,” says Harlem Gospel Travelers member Ifedayo Gatling. “Country, folk, rock, soul, blues; we love it all, and it’s all in there. When I grew up, on the way to church, you’d listen to gospel music. Then on the way back from church, it was ‘Back That Azz Up.’ Music is music, as long as it makes you feel something. I always tell people, no matter what you believe in, it’s about how does this makes you feel? Does it make you feel like you want to be a better person? Does it make you feel like you want to love somebody that you didn’t want to love before?”
The Harlem Gospel Travelers (HGT) story began when Gatling and George Marage met in high school. The group put out their debut LP, He’s On Time, to rave reviews in 2019, earning them high profile fans like Elton John and landing them festival slots everywhere from Pilgrimage to Telluride Jazz. Originally a quartet, they brought in Dennis Bailey and reconfigured as a trio prior to their 2021 recording Look Up!, their first album of all original material. Now, with their 2024 GRAMMY-nominated album Rhapsody, HGT are able to fully explore the entire range of music that has influenced them.
Their new record is a dive into a lesser-known but hugely important era in the evolution of gospel music. Starting in the mid-1960s, local gospel groups and singers began incorporating elements of popular soul and funk styles, and in 2006 Chicago- based reissue label Numero Group released Good God! A Gospel Funk Hymnal. HGT’s longtime friend and mentor Eli ‘Paperboy’ Reed approached the group with the idea of digging through the Numero catalog and recording some of the gospel funk material, reinterpreted in their own way—from the high-energy, old-school soul of “God’s Been Good to Me” to the hip-hop- inflected “Get Involved.” Gatling points out that Rhapsody is intended to showcase the full power of HGT as a collective. “It was important for all of us to have our own creative lens,” they say. “So we picked all of the material based on the different sides of our voices and our personalities that we wanted to show.”
The genre-busting approach of Rhapsody also encouraged the members of HGT to further embrace their own identities within the context of gospel music. “There are a whole bunch of queer people in the traditional church,” says Gatling, “but the openness hasn’t been there, people are very hush-hush about it. We want to represent people being free and sharing love and understanding with each other. That’s something that I see in our show all the time, people are inspired by us to go and spread love. It’s great to be a representation of a positive force and gospel music that is accepting of all people. To allow people to see themselves, see full freedom of expression—and how I express myself is completely different from how George or Dennis expresses himself. To have three different representations of Black queer people who happen to sing gospel music is something that, to my knowledge, has not been done before.”
At a moment when the world is reconsidering the concepts of genre and category and who’s allowed to participate in which traditions, HGT are squarely on the cultural pulse. “We always found it difficult to stay in this one lane of what people think gospel is supposed to be,” says Gatling. “This record allowed us to hear people that were innovators in their own time, pushing how gospel music sounded, and now we’ve created this project that is message-wise gospel, but the feeling and the sound can be whatever you want it to be.”
Learn more HERE:
https://www.munciethreetrails.com/series-artists-at-canan-commons/harlem-gospel-travelers/
Our special opening act, Doc Peterson, has been an extremely influential figure in Muncie’s music scene. The owner of Doc’s Music Hall for many years, Peterson has been playing music since the 60’s, gigging everywhere across the U.S. until he decided to settle down in the Magic City. He plays a regular (free!) Friday night gig at the Common Market in Muncie (900 West 8th Street). Learn more HERE: www.captainwawah.com
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