ELLY GRIMM
Leader & Times
There are many activities scheduled throughout February to commemorate Black History Month and earlier this week, Seward County Community College joined in on that.
Monday, SCCC hosted “African American Musicians in Kansas 1860-1920” presented by musician Lem Sheppard. During the show, he shared some of his own story of getting into music as well as some history of Kansas music. As Sheppard tells it, music had been part of his life for a long time.
“I grew up in Wyandotte County and back in the 1960s, the guitar was a popular toy – there were plastic toy guitars, there were cowboy guitars (maybe Roy Rogers guitars), but then The Beatles started making toy guitars that looked like electric guitars, so a lot of children got toy guitars. I don't know whether I was particularly inclined to it ... my parents got me one or maybe two guitars as a kid before I bought my own, but there were guitars all over the neighborhood,” Sheppard said. “Once I started looking back at it, I realized how historic Kansas City was, because there was a reason that so many kids got guitars. Their parents knew about musicians, and it was just part of the culture and there were lots of stories – for example, my mother actually went to school with Charlie Parker, and there were other well-known you know musicians all over Kansas City so that's how I got started, just knowing that and having music as something to do.”
However, Sheppard said, he did not begin seriously think about music as a career until college.
“By the time I got to college, and had to decide what to major in, I don't think I thought about music at first because I couldn't read music, but I found myself hanging out in the music department all the time because some of my classmates from elementary school and high school were really good musicians and some of them had gone to Sumner Academy in Kansas City, which was a REALLY big deal,” Sheppard said. “I thought I was going to be maybe be an English major or a history major, I didn't fully know what I wanted to do. I went from there to study music and was struggling through – it was rough two years because I didn't have the skills and then things finally clicked. By that time, I'd had enough Kansas City Community College credits to go to Pittsburg State University and I started finishing music school there. Eva Jessye, the artist in residence at the time, I didn't know who she was, but she was born in Coffeyville and later went out to the world and had done 'Porgy and Bess' and all this famous work. During Martin Luther King's March on Washington, she was the choral director for the program and she was there with Dr. King. She put together a choir and I was wound up being a member of what they called the Eva Jessye Choir and then we did some gigs as a group.”
The work continued throughout college, Sheppard said, and that later led to him going professional, which he said has been rather memorable.
“I used to write songs because I was doing Blues music and I'd write to my own songs, and there was one time I had come to Emporia State University and played at their college once. There was a bar there off campus and I remember I came back there and I was playing one of my songs and there was this guy sitting at his table and was singing along with my song,” Sheppard said. “And that was such an odd experience because that got me thinking 'Maybe I AM okay at this and maybe I can do this.' If my song hits somebody like that, that's amazing. It was a song I'd written called 'Stereo' and it's kind of crazy song, and it has this one look in it, and there he was sitting there and drinking this beer and singing, and that was definitely a moment. It was really the people like that actually wanting to hear my songs – it wasn't ever anything on my own and thinking I could thinking 'I could do this,' it was seeing the people accept me, and acceptance is a big deal. I also remember there was one time I'd played at a library in Salina, and there was a potluck after the show. I'd gone back to the hotel to pack up my equipment and then I got to the potluck a little late and there was this older lady who said 'Hey Lem, I saved you a rib,' and she had been at the show and apparently had thought 'They're going to eat everything before he gets a chance,' so I felt if I was that important to her, maybe that says something. It's just those sorts of situations where the people start treating you like you're somebody that really help you out.”
The desire to go into the more academic side of music, Sheppard said, came later on.
“What happened is, I think it was in 2017, Southeast Kansas has the mining museum and they were doing a program on the Black miners, so they wanted to bring me in to do some music of the era. I knew the music because you can look through music books and find songs Black people were singing during the mining era,” Sheppard said. “I was looking at newspapers and in one of the books I was reading, they used the phrase the colored band and I thought 'What's the colored band?' I'd read a story about Black miner named Montgomery who had died, and he was well known and well respected, and this story mentioned 'Colored bands came from Curranville' and this and that, and since I lived in that area, I thought 'You mean there Black bandsmen in all these little towns that are only a few hours apart?' That then got me thinking there was this whole era of American music I didn't know about like bands and cornet bands and cornet players, so then I started looking for that. Then, I found out there were full orchestras and bands and some itinerant musicians, so I expanded my search to the whole state of Kansas and one thing led to another, and I eventually started putting everything on a timeline. I initially thought I was going to find maybe 10 talking points for this program I was going to do, but I ended up with a 90-page timeline that's single-spaced and in 12-point type of every significant music event in Kansas dealing with African American history. I think I've almost hit redundancy and it's almost overwhelming in the sense that I almost felt like I could never get it all. It was one of those situations where I discovered one thing and it led me down the rabbit hole. There's just all this information out there and I didn't know there was so much to learn about Black musicians in Kansas because they played barn dance music, English folk music, and so much more.”
Overall, Sheppard said, he was very pleased with his visit to SCCC and said he looks forward to continuing his education efforts throughout the state.
“I love going around and talking to people about this music and the history behind it. And I'm always learning new things to add to my show, which is also great,” Sheppard said. “I felt really good about my stop at SCCC and got some good questions, and there's always something from every show I learn about that sends me down another rabbit hole, and there are definitely a few things I'm going to look up on the Internet when I get home. I had a great time in Liberal and maybe at some point in the future I'll make my way back here with another presentation.”
