. That record arrived after several years of artists like West and Chance the Rapper exploring gospel influences alongside Kirk Franklin, a modern figurehead in the genre.
“A lot of people just aren’t aware of the history, and there’s a need to really talk about it,” he says. “These are the people who really laid the foundation of gospel music as we know it today.”aired on January 10th, 1963, just three months before Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington.
The show also provided a forum for collaboration and community in the gospel world of the Sixties and Seventies. “It was always like a big family reunion when you’d go down there,” Mavis Staples told Steve Ordower. Each 30-minute television show would feature an encore with all the show’s guests singing together on a standard.