Today’s hot goss is all about Beyoncé’s history-making 32nd GRAMMY win, 88th nomination, and how they still won’t give her Album of the Year.
With only two GRAMMY wins, the Fisk University Jubilee Singers are on the complete opposite end of that spectrum. Still, they can relate.
After all, who cares what the Recording Academy’s awarding when you’ve got over 150 years of musical history as a force against racism, multiple world tours and concerts to monarchs, presidents, and other global leaders, and ALL the credit for bringing slave spirituals to mainstream music?
In 1866, Nashville’s Fisk University became America’s first institution of higher learning “to offer a liberal arts education to ‘young men and women irrespective of color.’”
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Five years later, the school was nearly bankrupt.
Brief as it had been, Fisk had a legacy to maintain, and they weren’t letting it die without a fight. One man at Fisk held the title of both treasurer and music professor, and he devised a clever plan. A choral ensemble could hold concerts benefitting the university. Besides, there truly was nothing left to lose.
Nine men and women shaped the unnamed ensemble, who’d begin their tour in the small towns near Nashville. Soon, their director had another clever idea: a national tour along the route of the Underground Railroad. Most of Fisk’s student body was comprised of Black students who’d been recently freed from enslavement with the 1863 signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, so a public tour in the locations their ancestors and even parents had secretly sought freedom was a poignant—and marketable—move.
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It was also entirely unheard of. Before this, Black people didn’t perform in public spaces—but white people in minstrel makeup did. Many reviews of the time even noted this phenomenon, with one writing “Those who have only heard the burnt cork caricatures of negro minstrelsy have not the slightest conception of what it really is.” So when the Fisk Singers began touring in earnest in October 1871, many people attended their shows out of the sheer novelty. Nearly all left as fans.
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Even the singers themselves had to be won over initially. Just because these songs had come from within their culture didn’t mean that every Black person in America knew them. Spirituals were sung in the fields, secretly formed churches, and as code songs, so those who’d been freed from slavery before the Proclamation, or lived in affluent, free-standing communities like Seneca Village had no reason to know them. And when they did, they were reluctant to share them with a racist society.
Ella Sheppard, one of the original members wrote, “Sitting upon the floor (there were but few chairs) [we sang] softly, learning from each other the songs of our fathers. We did not dream of ever using them in public… they were sacred to our parents, who used them in their religious worship and shouted over them… It was only after many months that gradually our hearts were opened… and we began to appreciate the wonderful beauty and power of our songs.”
During one of their first stops, they were forced to use that power against an angry white mob that cornered them at a train station. The Fisk Singers’ worshipful songs, angelic voices, and non-violent response shamed the mob into dispersing. “One by one, the riotous crowd left off their jeering and swearing and slunk back until only the leader stood near Mr. White and finally took off his hat,” Ms. Sheppard wrote. “The leader begged us, with tears falling, to sing the hymn again.”
But those beautiful voices couldn’t save them from racism every time. When they donated the proceeds of one of their first concerts in Cincinnati to victims of the Great Fire of Chicago, they were thanked on their next stop in Columbus with terrible hotel accommodations, name-calling from the newspapers, and all manners of abuse from the locals. It was only their first month on tour, and many of the singers—and their parents who didn’t want to allow their children on the tour for this very reason—were so disheartened, they were ready to throw in the towel.
After a night of prayer, the singers regrouped and to build their spirits, were finally given a name that referenced both their heritage and their musical repertoire: The Jubilee Singers. It’s written in the book of Leviticus that every fifty-first year would be a “year of jubilee” in which all slaves would be set free, and the Fisk singers almost exclusively sang spirituals. It fit, spirits were lifted, and the show went on.
18 months later, the Jubilee Singers sent $40,000 back to Fisk, more than they could ever have earned through organized fundraising efforts alone.
Their fame had also grown too big to turn back. By 1872, invitations to the Fisk Jubilee Singers were pouring in. The World’s Peace Jubilee and International Musical Festival in Boston, President Ulysses S. Grant’s White House, and Steinway Hall in Manhattan were among a few of the venues they performed.
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But in 1873 came their crown jewel: a surprise performance and audience with Queen Victoria of England. The Queen requested a handful of songs by name: “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Did the Lord Deliver Daniel,” and “Go Down Moses.” She made her share of unsavory requests too. “Tell the dark-skinned one to step forward,” Ella Sheppard wrote in her diary, quoting the Queen’s request to have a better look at Jennie Jackson, another of the singers. Still, their appearance, performance and the combination of both left such an impression on the Queen that she commissioned a portrait of the Jubilee Singers that still hangs today in the university’s Jubilee Hall, built with $150,000 the singers earned from their European tour.
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Their reception in Europe mirrored the attitudes in the States. Some places were progressive enough to recognize the Jubilee Singers’ humanity, others were brutally racist.
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These conflicts and controversy around them left their toll on the singers. But they also began reshaping attitudes around racism and segregation. George Pullman personally integrated his entire fleet of trains after learning the Jubilee Singers had been automatically denied accommodations because of their race. When Jersey City voted to integrate schools after the Jubilee Singers had been turned away from a local hotel, the New Jersey Journal wrote, “By their sweet songs and simple ways, the Jubilee Singers are moulding and manufacturing public sentiment.”
Those sweet songs also molded American music as we know it today. “If they had not begun to sing the songs of their ancestors in concert halls, this oral tradition, which existed only in the memories of former slaves, would most likely have been lost to history forever.” The New York Times writes. “And if it had disappeared, it would have taken with it the DNA of much of the American music that followed: blues, gospel, jazz, country, rock, and more.”
And not just American music. Before the Jubilee Singers toured Europe again in 2015, Richard Hawley, a Head of Artistic Programming in Birmingham, England said, “They are without doubt responsible for introducing the Black Oral Tradition to the U.K., and are therefore responsible, certainly in part, for the enormous diversity of music we now have in this country.”
Though they briefly disbanded for a year, the Fisk Jubilee Singers still exist and you can witness an enduring American legacy, live and in person. Until then, stream their catalog—past and present—on Spotify or Apple Music, and listen to how through song and struggle, they saved their school, transformed attitudes across two continents, and left a lasting mark on music as the Gospel Group of the Ages.
KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:
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Visit the digital home of today’s Jubilee Singers for more on their past, present and future.
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Learn more about The Fisk Jubilee Singers and some of its original members at the Smithsonian Archives Blog.
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Discover the depths of the Jubilee Singers’ “Sacrifice and Glory” at PBS.
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“In Walk Together Children: The 150th Anniversary of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Dr. Paul T. Kwami and the current singers explore the stories of the world-renowned ensemble’s original nine members and reflect on their roles as students and preservers of the group’s legacy.”
Watch the trailer & full-length special now on PBS.
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There’s even more about how the Fisk Jubilee Singers changed American music at the New York Times.
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“Jubilee: An Inspirational A Capella Tribute” ran in 2019. Revisit scenes from the show & reenactments from Ella Sheppard’s diary here.