The Enduring Legacy of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers
In honor of Black History Month, it is important to acknowledge the significant contributions of African Americans to the cultural landscape of the United States. Among these contributions, the Fisk Jubilee Singers stand out as a pivotal force in preserving and popularizing African American spirituals. This a cappella group, formed in 1871 by students from Fisk University, not only saved their financially struggling institution but also introduced "slave songs" to the world, leaving an indelible mark on American musical tradition.
Origins and Purpose
Fisk University, an historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee, was founded in 1866 by the American Missionary Association (AMA) for the education of newly freed African American slaves after the end of the American civil war in 1865. Despite its numerous supporters, the university faced much resistance from those opposed to the ending of slavery and the education of Black Americans. By 1871, the school was running out of money. George Leonard White, a music teacher, came up with a plan to help raise money for the school. He formed a singing group with five female and four male students. The plan was for them to travel across the country and perform to raise money for the school.
The Jubilee Singers were students of Fisk University. The original mission of the singers was to raise money for the school. In 1871, George L. White, Fisk’s treasurer and a music professor, had the idea of touring with a choir of nine students in an effort to raise money for the school. The singers, nine of whom were former slaves, began a tour of the Northern states of America in 1871 under the directorship of Caucasian ex-soldier George L. White who was also Fisk University’s treasurer and instructor of music.
Early Struggles and Breakthroughs
At first, the singing group performed in small towns at churches, theaters, and music halls. They sang popular songs at first but added traditional African American spirituals as they grew in popularity. The initial first concerts were not financially successful and the singers experienced some problems with racism, often being barred from lodging houses or being physically threatened. However, audiences started to increase in size when the group began to sing ‘slave songs’ or 'spirituals' sung in a unique style, described at the time as “full of religious earnestness and pathos… " with "a feeling of real and natural piety.” According to Ella Sheppard (one of the original singers), they never intended to sing those songs in their concerts. Their popularity led Sheppard and White to collect more songs from the community to perform.
In March 1872, the singers sang in front of President Grant at the White House and in the same month performed at the prestigious Steinway Hall in New York. White named the group the Jubilee Singers for the “year of jubilee” that is mentioned in the Bible. It referred to the year when all those enslaved were to be set free. By 1872, the Fisk Jubilee Singers grew in popularity and started performing for huge audiences. They earned enough money to pay for their travel and send money back to the school.
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The Power of Spirituals
The Jubilee Singers were impressive individuals but what of their music? They feared white audiences would only want to hear white music, or the music of the black-face minstrels. Instead, the Jubilees were received warmly, if not with largesse, until they sang to the congregation of Henry Ward Beecher, the most popular preacher of his day and brother of Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Beecher bade his rich parishioners to give generously - and they did.
The group started performing their “Negro spirituals” to sold-out venues. Sheet music was sold during intermission, spreading it beyond their immediate audiences. Mark Twain said of the group, “I do not know when anything has so moved me as did the plaintive melodies of the Jubilee Singers.” In 2002, the Library of Congress added the 1909 recording of that year’s Jubilee Singers’ “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” to the United States National Recording Registry.
Triumphs at Home and Abroad
In 1873, the group grew to 11 members. With their new members, the singers traveled to Europe to perform. There they sang for England’s Prime Minister William Gladstone and Queen Victoria! The money they made during this tour paid for the building at Fisk called Jubilee Hall. It is one of the oldest buildings still standing at Fisk University today. The funds raised that year were used to construct the school's first permanent building, Jubilee Hall. Today Jubilee Hall, a designated National Historic Landmark, is one of the oldest structures on campus.
On Friday 1 August 1873, the Fisk University Jubilee Singers arrived in Hull to perform their so-called 'slave songs' or 'spirituals' to a crowded Hope Street Congregational Church. According to the Hull Packet, the eleven male and female African American singers from the newly established Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, performed with "pathetic beauty" and "much feeling" to the fifteen-hundred invited guests. The troupe had arrived in England in early May and had already performed in London before the Prime Minister Mr Gladstone and an enraptured Queen Victoria by the time they arrived in Hull.
During their first tour of America the singers had performed in front of prominent members of the American clergy such as the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, a popular Christian speaker. With Beecher’s endorsement and connections with British Christian organisations such as the Freedmen’s Missions Aid Society, the Jubilee Singers engaged upon a long tour of Britain and Europe designed to raise more money for the erection of a Jubilee Hall at the University. They arrived in England on 6 May 1873 and performed, as mentioned before, in front of many notable British dignitaries including members of the Royal Family.
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After three months in London the Jubilee Singers came to Hull. There, according to the Rev. G. D. Pike’s published record of the singers’ tour, the group discovered by reading the monument’s inscription that the foundation stone had been erected on that day, thirty-nine years before - the same day as the abolition of slavery in the British Colonies. What seems clear from these few reports is that the singers’ schedule, while financially lucrative, was also punishing. As scholar Sandra Graham has suggested, the young Fisk student singers were unused to the “cold and damp climate of Britain” and what with the “rigors of travelling, a heavy concert schedule, and the stress of long separations from friends and family” they “were frequently sick and exhausted.”
The Jubilee Singers returned to Hull for their second visit to the city on Friday 5 December. George White spoke at the event, referring “with gratitude” to the singer’s previous reception at Hull which he described as the first city in the country in which they had “made money beyond their expenses” and been able to send money home. American newspapers also recorded this second visit by the singers to Hull. On the Sunday it was reported that the seven female members of the group and one of the male singers (it is unclear who), accompanied by White, attended a large gathering of three thousand school children and their teachers at Hull’s Artillery Barracks. The following afternoon the singers were taken on a tour of Wilberforce House, the emancipator’s former home, after they had expressed a “strong desire” to do so.
By the time the singers returned to Hull on 20 April 1874 for their ‘farewell’ concerts, they had been constantly touring England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales for twelve months. However, it was noted by the newspaper that the former “joyous feeling” had “worn to some extent… by the form of frequent repetition.” This seems unsurprising considering the singers' hectic touring schedule, frequent illness and constant travelling. It is also apparent from contemporary reports that the group’s leader George White was struggling with illness himself and that his wife had died suddenly in Glasgow only two months before of typhoid fever.
During an interlude at the April performance at Hengler’s Circus, the singers were presented with a promised memento of William Wilberforce to take back with them to Nashville. It was a ‘life-like’ painting of the emancipator and former local MP, painted by local Hull artist Benjamin Hudson. After the singers gave their farewell concerts in Hull in April 1874, the troupe began a tour of Europe. They had successfully raised £10,000 for the building of the new Jubilee Hall at Fisk University.
Individual Stories of Resilience
Two original members of this remarkable ensemble were Miss Ella Sheppard and Mr Thomas Rutling. Ella Sheppard was both pianist and mentor for the Singers. Her father, already a free man, was able to buy and free her; the owner refused to sell the mother as well. Ella and her mother reunited after the Emancipation Proclamation. She received a musical education, but, as she later explained, “[I] was the only colored pupil; was not allowed to tell who my teacher was: and, more than all that, I went in the back way, and received my lessons in a back room up stairs …”(Pike, p. 52).
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Thomas Rutling was born in 1854. His mother, a habitual runaway, was sold when he was two - his earliest memory; several of his sisters were sold, as well. Young Tom became the conduit of information between “the house” and the slave quarters during the Civil War. After the war, he and his brother located and reunited with one of their eight sisters, and Tom learned to read. “I remember,” he recalled as a Jubilee Singer, “how hard work it was - harder than picking out my Latin lessons this summer” (Pike, p.
Two other members of the original Singers were Maggie Porter and Benjamin M. Holmes. As a child, Maggie Porter led a relatively sheltered life as playmate to the son of her owner. After the war, she was one of the first pupils of the newly formed Fisk School, the later Fisk University. By fifteen, she was teaching at a school near Nashville. Over the Christmas vacation, the Ku Klux Klan rendered the school a heap of ashes; undaunted, she continued to teach at other schools.
Benjamin Holmes was born in Charleston, S.C. in 1846 (or 1848, he himself didn’t know) and taught himself to read and write while apprenticed to a tailor. When the Union Army approached the city in 1862, his owners fled to the countryside after selling him to a trader; Benjamin was in the slave mart when he read of the Emancipation Proclamation. “Such rejoicing as there was then!” he later remembered (Pike, p. 58). His reading skills enabled him to earn a good living as a clerk and a teacher after the war, but his part of Tennessee didn’t like “colored” schools, either - one day, someone shot through the window of the class he was teaching.
Disbandment and Reformation
By 1878, the Fisk Jubilee Singers had traveled the world and performed hundreds of concerts. There were even other groups who copied their musical style and sometimes their name. The singers were starting to grow tired. They needed a break. The original Jubilee Singers disbanded in 1878 because of their grueling touring schedule. As Ella Sheppard, one of the original Jubilee Singers recalled, "our strength was failing under the ill treatment at hotels, on railroads, poorly attended concerts, and ridicule."
However, the story of the Jubilee Singers does not end in 1878. The very next year in 1879, the group was reformed with more members than ever before. A new Jubilee Singers choir was formed in 1879 under the direction of George L. White and singer Frederick J. Loudin. This troupe, formed by White, consisted of Jennie Jackson, Maggie Porter, Georgia Gordon, Mabel Lewis, Patti Malone, Hinton Alexander, Benjamin W. Thomas, Ella Sheppard (until 1882), and newcomers R. A. Hall, Mattie Lawrence, and George E. Barrett.
Legacy and Continued Influence
The Fisk Jubilee Singers are still performing to this day. Over the years, they have won many awards. Most recently, they were honored by the Americana Music Association with the Legacy of Americana Award. They also won a Grammy Award for the Best Roots Gospel Album called Celebrating Fisk! The 150th Anniversary Album. Their music has stood the test of time. Today, the Jubilee Singers are still an active choir and even won the Grammy for Best Roots Gospel Album with their release, Celebrating Fisk! (The 150th Anniversary Album), in 2021.
The group’s historical sound, continued resilience, and worldwide impact. The Fisk Jubilee Singers are being recognized for their significant contributions to preserving African American spirituals. The original Jubilee Singers introduced slave songs to the world in 1871 and were instrumental in preserving this unique American musical tradition known today as Negro spirituals. They influenced many other troupes of jubilee singers who would go on to make their own contributions to the genre, such as the Original Nashville Students.
In 2008, the Fisk Jubilee Singers were selected as a recipient of the 2008 National Medal of Arts, the nation's highest honor for artists and patrons of the arts. The award was presented by President George W. Bush.
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