His Truth Is Marching On: A Musical Documentary Film

The story of American music from 1619 to Hip Hop, told through the Civil War song, John Brown’s Body

This project began as a late-stage COVID community art project launched through Culture 4 A Cause, a NW Connecticut nonprofit you may have heard of. Today, it is officially public art.

We recorded a Civil War song about John Brown as a way to build community art and community pride and to promote equality, basically.

The song turned into a video, and the video turned into a musical documentary film.

We did this to say out loud that equality matters. Originally, we said it during the social justice movement driven by George Floyd’s murder. In support of a positive movement growing out of a horrific event.

Since then, we’ve seen a tremendous wave of backlash, just like in other times in history where social progress has been made. So, nowadays, I say out loud that equality matters because people are under attack daily. They're under attack because of who they are, how they look, who they love.

And that’s wrong. I believe that people are people, and they deserve dignity and respect for the simple fact that they exist.

This film explores the causes and effects of each type of American music to blossom in the rich soil that African and Indigenous American people developed through drums, voice, and playing with a pentatonic scale.

Simply put, the world owes a great debt to African American musicians for literally every type of popular music since the American Civil War.