Vermont ranks second in the nation for both the whitest population and the least religious one. This might seem the unlikeliest of places to hear Black gospel music — a tradition born of slavery, spirituals and the Pentecostal church.
Yet gospel is here and has been for decades. The latest arrival is the Green Mountain Gospel Choir, Burlington’s first year-round community gospel choir. The 25 singers, led by cofounder Jonathan Ellwanger, gave their first concert during the city of Burlington’s 2025 Martin Luther King Jr. Day festivities. They’ll again perform in honor of the civil rights leader — in events this week for the NAACP in Rutland and the Champlain College community in Burlington — and will make their next public appearance at a spring concert.
At a recent Tuesday-night rehearsal at the college, 13 choir members — white, Black and Asian — gathered around a conference table. The collective vibe was one of friendly, welcoming energy. Ellwanger, 60, a retired elementary school teacher and principal who is white, opened with a prayer, which he ended by punching a chord on his tabletop Yamaha keyboard. Then, armed only with copies of song lyrics, the choir launched into the joyful, rhythmic “Jesus Promised” and “Clap Your Hands,” with the director coaching each voice part by singing it in his malleable tenor. The keyboard sounded like a small organ, and the clapping was infectious.
The Green Mountain Gospel Choir joins several other gospel groups in the area. There’s a small choir at the New Alpha Missionary Baptist Church, founded in 1989 and still Vermont’s only congregation worshipping in the Black Baptist tradition. From 1993 to 2021, it sponsored a well-attended annual Gospel Fest. Montpelier has had a community gospel choir since 1994. And the music department of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh has a notable gospel choir led by chemistry professor Dexter Criss.
Ellwanger quickly identified all these groups when he and his Vermonter wife moved to Williston in 2021, shortly after his retirement from 30 years at a school in Oak Park, Ill. (He recently started working again as a behavior interventionist at Union Memorial School in Colchester.)
Ellwanger’s experience as a gospel singer, director and pianist is extensive, and his faith runs deep. Nevertheless, his race raises the question that Arnold Thomas, a retired Black minister and host of “The Talk, Vermont” on Town Meeting TV, genially asked him during an interview in November: “What’s a white guy like you doing with a group like this?”
Ellwanger first heard gospel music as an infant in Birmingham, Ala., where his Lutheran pastor father led a Black congregation. When he was 2, his father moved the family to Milwaukee to lead an inner-city congregation in a Black neighborhood. Ellwanger went on to study music and sing in a gospel choir at Northwestern University. As an educator in Oak Park, outside Chicago, he formed a gospel choir at his elementary school and led another at a nearby Black Lutheran church, where he served as music minister.
Once in Vermont, Ellwanger joined the Plattsburgh State Gospel Choir, introduced himself to the New Alpha congregation — where he now leads the choir — and applied to become director of the Montpelier Community Gospel Choir. He narrowly lost the job to a Black minister candidate but in the meantime met Thomas, who sits on the Montpelier group’s board and was part of the search committee. The two men soon founded the Green Mountain Gospel Choir. Thomas sings in the bass section.
The Green Mountain Gospel Choir fills “the vacuum [that] happened when Gospel Fest dried up,” Ellwanger said by phone. That annual evening event, featuring two or three gospel choirs, was held at the Flynn theater in later years and packed the house more than once, according to New Alpha administrator Adline Robertson.
New members of all stripes are welcome at Green Mountain, and Thomas noted that the group’s practice of learning the music by ear makes it accessible for all. “That’s how much African American music is taught, especially gospel,” he added. “And there are a lot of nuances you add to it as you sing, so no piece is ever the same; each director puts his unique twist. Jonathan is doing a magnificent job.”
The community is such a supportive, embracing one. It’s fun.
Arnold Thomas
Even rhythm-challenged people, Thomas said, can “learn the rhythm, the cadence, pretty fast. The community is such a supportive, embracing one. It’s fun.”
Plenty of members have no religious affiliation, but, Ellwanger pointed out, “gospel music is sacred music. You can’t get around that. I don’t need you to believe in God, but at the very least you need to believe that the person who wrote [the music] believes very deeply that these words are not just words.”
“I’m not religious; I’m not even musical,” tenor Kris Daley, 63, of Burlington said with a laugh. She interprets the sacred aspect of the music as a call to “be in the moment.” Gospel’s universal message of hope through spirituality can be uplifting for anyone, she added, particularly “people who have gone through tragedy.”
That makes it more than a cultural tradition that has influenced virtually all American music.
“The word ‘gospel’ means good news,” and there’s no time that needs that optimism like the present, Ellwanger said. He hopes audiences will “find a promise of hope and empowerment. There are possibilities beyond what we see that are there for all of us, if we only just believe.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Raised in Praise | Green Mountain Gospel Choir spreads good news and hope in Burlington”
This article appears in The Wellness Issue • 2026.
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