St. Paul AME Church is 150 years old and is the oldest Black church in Wichita. Among the congregation are fond memories of the gospel album, “Lord I’ll Be Willing.” Recorded in 1968 by the St. Paul Gospel Chorus, the album is a rare artifact from that era.
Ninety-three-year-old Marvin Stone Jr. and 80-year-old Donna Miller are two of the original choir members. They survey the album cover, looking at the faces of fellow singers clothed in their robes and stoles. Several have passed away; others have moved away. The choir, mostly in their 20s and 30s at the time, was primed and ready to record in May 1968.
“When I joined St. Paul, I knew right off that I was going to join that choir,” Miller said with a laugh, “and I did. It was a good choir. We all got along and had a good time, and we traveled quite a bit. We just loved it; we just loved to sing. I think we were better than we realized we were, I mean we were very good.”
Miller moved from El Dorado to Wichita in her early 20s.
“I grew up singing at Lane Chapel CME Church in El Dorado,” she said.
She was trained by Jamie Neally, who she says prepared her to sing especially in the church, honing her distinctive alto voice.
“The directress, Dr. Betty [Eubanks] Lessard, would give us songs to learn,” Miller said. “Back then, I could learn the words a little quicker and she’d give us time to practice the song.”
Miller recalls the choir coming together to record in St. Paul’s sanctuary. “We were in the choir stand — the man who produced the record was down front with the recording equipment. I know my song, surprisingly, was really a one-take; I just had to sing it one time.”
When she recorded the song, “You Must Be Born Again,” she thought about her mother, Florance Garland.
“It was like listening to my mother,” she said tearfully. “Just saying, ‘You must be born again.’ I do think about my mother when I would sing that song.”
Miller remembers her mother’s heartfelt response to the tune: “She’d be doing what I’m doing, crying.”
Stone was the soloist on the song, “It All Belongs To My Father.”
“I came from the holiness church,” Stone said. “I’ve always been singing. We had a choir at Elder Cremo’s church. The Murdock Church of God in Christ, now known as Tabernacle Church of God in Christ, at one time ... [had] many Stones in the church that we were the choir. When I came to St. Paul, I thought I was ready for prime time [Laughs].”
Stone said he hand-picked his song to record on the album.
“Some of these solos I did with the choir prior to the recording,” Stone said. “That was just one of the songs that I thought I really wanted to sing, and Betty thought I did a real good job with it.
Coming from my background in singing in the holiness church, we just learned to just sing and don’t think about it, so once you do that, you just feel it, and so it’s not the words on a piece of paper.
“By the way, when we made that album, none of us had a piece of paper in front of us. We all knew the words, so it was just kind of like a feeling because we were all young and just thought we were ready.”
“We did not play,” Miller said. “We listened and when Betty said this is what we are going to do, we did it. She ran a tight ship.”
Stone said the choir was really invested in singing the gospel tunes.
“You felt the song,” he said. “You had to have some kind of connection with the song and so all of the songs, even on the album, came out of just our practicing and enjoying singing.”
Miller said her favorite was “Peace Be Still” by soloist Jesse Shepard, who passed away in 1982.
“I can hear your daddy, Carla [Eckels], singing that song, 'Peace Be Still', and when he would say, ‘Master… the tempest is raging’ — you knew what was coming.
“It really appealed to me,” Miller said. “It was peace — it just went through your soul when he was singing it. I think the time when Jesse would get in the middle of it, it just kind of consumed him and he really felt what he was saying and what we really loved about that is when Jesse got into a song it was just him.”
“I remember one time when he was singing,” Stone said, “he got caught up and said, ‘Stone, I just couldn’t just let it go.’ He had a conviction when he sang and sometimes it reduced him to tears cause when he sang a song, that was Jesse Shepard.”
Both Miller and Stone remember recording the lively “Battle of Jericho.”
“Betty’s brother, John Johnson, known as ‘Sonny,’ sang the lead,” Miller said. “That was a lot of fun, and the walls came tumbling, tumbling down!”
The men start out singing, “Have You Heard About Joshua”, and then the women responded, “At the Battle of Jericho!” The choir would sing softly and then crescendo.
“As the voices changed, everybody hit their notes,” Stone said. “We weren’t caught up in the technology of producing the song, we just sang out of our hearts because we believed in what we were singing.
“Everybody was so dedicated to the choir. It wasn’t a frivolous thing because sometimes we sang ourselves to tears.”
“The person that recorded it,” Miller said, “was surprised that we didn’t have to do any retakes, and we honestly didn’t on all of them. It was just a one-time deal, so God was with us.”
“The community really liked it,” Stone remembered. “I think we had albums across the country. Everybody had one. St. Paul did grow. There were people who were coming, and they wanted to join the choir, and it was a great time.”
“I think that was one of the greater moments in St. Paul. We ceased to become a choir, and we were just an instrument of God to sing like that. The songs that we sang had meaning so it wasn’t, ‘This was my song or your song.’ The choir was so together, and I think that our uplift of each other had a lot to do with it.”
