Echoes of Indiana Avenue
At Musical Family Tree, our mission is to “nurture local artists, preserve our original music legacy, and build a shared community of music makers & music lovers.” And you can’t have a conversation about Indiana’s original music legacy without talking about Indiana Avenue and the black culture that thrived there. There was a whole ecology to “the Avenue” and generations of music and art were produced there. It’s important to remember that for every Wes Montgomery, Freddie Hubbard, and JJ Johnson, there were hundreds of other Indiana artists who inspired, played with, and built off of their work. The Avenue is known for jazz but in the 60s and 70s it also had a thriving funk, R&B, blues scenes and more.
Herman “Butch” Slaughter - photo by Jes Nijjer
Listeners in Indianapolis can now take part in celebrating this legacy by tuning in to a weekly radio program on WFYI, “Echoes of Indiana Avenue” (named after this stellar Wes Montgomery release). Produced by local journalist Kyle Long, the program is hosted by Herman “Butch” Slaughter. Slaughter founded the Indianapolis based group Words of Wisdom, and grew up on the Avenue. He has performed with artists like James Brown, Curtis Mayfield and Solomon Burke, and Words of Wisdom have been sampled by hip-hop artists including Ice-T, A Tribe Called Quest, and Black Sheep. Today Butch is an invaluable link to the Avenue and brings it to life weekly on his show on WFYI. The show features episodes celebrating big names like Leroy Carr and JJ Johnson, but also digs deeper, currently the show is in the midst of a series on “The Rock & Roll Women of Indiana Avenue”.
SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/3LD6EkrKlhtA4IcVjOrMEs
Fun note: In 2015 Musical Family Tree’s “IN Covers” program featured the Absonites remaking Words of Wisdom’s “Do You Understand Me Now”. You can hear it on the archive HERE.
For more on the history of Indiana Avenue, and how institutional racism led to its downfall, please read Wildstyle Paschall’s article Indiana Avenue: The Ethnic Cleansing of Black Indianapolis