Season 2: Gospel Music in the Black Church Tradition - Frank McGriggs

In this episode, host Jean Greene welcomes Mr. Frank McGriggs, a Utica native whose love of gospel quartet music has followed him from childhood church rehearsals to the battlefields of Iraq and back home again. Mr. McGriggs traces his musical roots to age 13, when Mrs. Kathleen McGriggs recruited him into the Traveling Voices, instilling in him not just harmony and technique but a lifelong ethic of service — always take care of home first, and never pass up a benefit program for someone in need. That foundation carried him through military service, where he founded the Voices of Reason in Iraq, and eventually led him into a career in education, where he came to see teaching and gospel ministry as deeply intertwined callings.

The conversation turns to the role of gospel music as a source of hope in a community that has absorbed significant loss — the grocery store, the sewing plant, the bank, the high school — and how quartet music in particular has served as both comfort and continuity for Utica. Mr. McGriggs reflects on the cycle of mentorship that sustains the tradition, noting that just as Mrs. Kathleen once found him as a teenager, he has since taken young singers under his wing and given piano lessons to keep the music alive for the next generation. The episode closes with a shared conviction between host and guest that gospel music, rooted in the spirituals and carried forward through groups like the Utica Southernaires, the Sensational Chosen Voices, and the Voices of Reason, will never die in Utica as long as there are people committed to passing it on.

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