By Rick Zeigler—
MUNCIE, IN— Acclaimed, GRAMMY-nominated gospel/soul group Harlem Gospel Travelers will be performing in a FREE outdoor concert as part of the 2025 Muncie Three Trails Music Series. The concert will take place at 7:00 PM on Friday, June 13th at Canan Commons (500 S. Walnut St.) in the heart of downtown Muncie, IN. Doc and the Little Chicago Band will open the show.
The Harlem Gospel Travelers (HGT) story began when Ifedayo 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.”
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.”
The Muncie Three Trails Music Series is a non-profit partnership between Muncie Downtown Development Partnership and Rick Zeigler, series founder and organizer. The mission of the series is to bring critically acclaimed, national recording artists to perform at Canan Commons, Muncie’s premier outdoor performance venue, located in the heart of Downtown Muncie, and at the Brown Family Amphitheater at Ball State University.
A second mission is to promote the many recreational, artistic, and cultural attractions located along, or in close proximity to downtown Muncie, Ball State, and Muncie’s popular “Three Trails” — The White River Greenway, Cardinal Greenway, and Muncie Arts and Culture Trail. We hope attendees will heed our slogan, “Explore the Trails, Enjoy the Music”.
