Public Reception of the Fisk Jubilee Singers

The Fisk Jubilee singers are hailed as key pioneers of “concert spirituals”, arrangements of African-American spirituals meant for the stage. They were extremely successful in their earliest years, around the 1870s: they were invited to perform at the White House, Queen Victoria commissioned a floor-to-ceiling portrait of the original members as a gift, and they raised enough funds on tours in the US and Europe to build the first permanent building at Fisk University.

Jubilee Hall at Fisk University, funded by the Fisk Jubilee Singers tour

To investigate the public’s opinion of the Jubilee Singers, I looked to an article in The Aldine, a monthly arts magazine printed in New York during the 1800s. At first glance, the review (from March of 1873) is complimentary. However, upon closer reading, some misconceptions about the Fisk Jubilee Singers become apparent. This article is evidence of how, while the Fisk Jubilee Singers were extremely successful and popular, the public’s perspective during the 1870’s still upheld racist ideas that are often applied to musics outside of the European canon.

The first thing I would like to highlight to this point was that the author claimed the Singers’ skill was natural talent.

“They have art; but it is the product of a rich natural gift, polished by natural taste and discrimination […] A musical voice seems to be a characteristic endowment of their race,”

This idea that musical talent is passed down rather than taught can be historically seen associated with many non-European musical traditions, including African percussion and Appalachian banjo music (as we discussed in class). This tactic “others” the music, and fails to recognize the hard work of the musicians. In this case, although the author is complementing the Jubilee Singers, they also say that the group lacks “cultivation” and “scientific instruction,” a Eurocentric value judgement which reveals the problematic side of this claim.

A second comment of note in this article can be found when the author is discussing the songs that the Fisk Jubilee Singers perform.

“They are clearly not the product of civilization, and yet an instinct seems to have taught their makers to follow strict musical laws. Wild and irregular as many of them seem on first hearing […] the strangest phrases can be correctly expressed in musical notation.”

When the author refers to “musical laws” and upholds musical notation as the “scientific” way to do things, they imply that this is the right and true way to express music. This reminds me of how transcriptions of Native American music were thought to be sufficient by their creators, but when the transcriptions are compared to audio recordings, there are large discrepancies. In both cases, the European musical framework is assigned more value. In fact, the author says that the way spirituals follow “musical laws” despite their creators lack of formal musical education is proof that these laws are “what the ear requires,” a claim which is ill-conceived in multiple ways.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers are an inspiring success story, and they still perform today as one of the most acclaimed choirs in the country, often serving an ambassador role internationally. However, this review makes it clear that even in their success, the Jubilee Singers were not exempt from discrimination and bias in the public eye.

“MUSIC.: THE JUBILEE SINGERS.” The Aldine, A Typographic Art Journal (1871-1873), 03, 1873, 67, https://www.proquest.com/magazines/music/docview/124830318/se-2.

Fisk Jubilee Singers. “Our History.” Accessed October 2, 2024. https://fiskjubileesingers.org/about-the-singers-2/our-history/.

“The Power of Music”: Charles Williams and His Jubilee Singers

In an article written for the Chicago Defender in 1954, Enoch Waters writes about Charles P. Williams and the choir he had founded fifty years prior in Chicago, reflecting on “the power of music” to break racial barriers.1 Waters mentions Williams’ “refreshing” and “jaunty” personality and the benefits of professional management as factors in their success in small towns across the country, many of which had never encountered a Black person before. However, Waters writes that Williams considered their music the “most effective weapon of the group in combating racial discrimination”, and although many towns received them with hostility initially, when they returned to these towns for another performance, they would “almost invariably” find a warm and hospitable welcome and sold-out crowds.

Williams’ ensemble was sometimes billed as Williams’ Jubilee Singers, and sometimes as Williams’ Colored Singers.2 The former label was a tribute to the original Fisk Jubilee Singers, who had paved the way for Black performers (later to include H.T. Burleigh, J. Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson, and others) to bring spirituals to the white American public.3 Williams’ group, founded in 1904, was not the first choir to take advantage of Fisk’s success, but they were one of the first to sing in a quartet, rather than a larger group of ten to twelve.4 The Fisk group had sought to elevate the spirituals and prove that Black music belonged in a high-class setting, resulting in the crystallization of the genre and transforming its norms of variance into ones of fixity. These were the issues that later led Zora Neale Hurston to react to the concert performances of Burleigh and others, proclaiming that “there has never been a presentation of genuine Negro spirituals to any audience anywhere”.6 Williams’ group, made up of classically trained and educated performers, evidently wished to fit into this tradition. They were internationally known, touring several European countries and performing 130 concerts in London alone.2 However, Waters notes that by 1932, “the radio, the depression, and the public’s change in music taste conspired to end a long brilliant career”. As tastes changed, so did the circumstances that had allowed Williams’ group to have an impact on small town America.

The Chicago Defender developed in much the same circumstances as Williams’ ensemble. It was founded just one year later in the same city, and its founder, Robert Abbott, was a former member of the Hampton Singers, one of the first Black university choirs to imitate Fisk.6 Abbott envisioned a newspaper that would become the “defender” of the Black community, and by the early 1920s it had become the most influential Black newspaper in America, protesting against Jim Crow laws and acts of violence while championing the growing civil rights movement. Its calls for black people to move out of the South were a primary cause of the Great Migration, and in many ways the advances made by the Defender led the way for the Black press in general, illustrating the paper’s enormous impact. While the Harlem Renaissance was seen by many as a victory only for the elite, the Defender sought to present Chicago as an ideal destination for ordinary Black people by featuring personal accounts as well as by highlighting local artists, entrepreneurs and others who had found success in Chicago.7

While this profile of Williams’ Jubilee Singers was written retrospectively to celebrate a group which had found success in the past rather than to highlight a rising star, the article serves many of the same purposes as earlier Defender articles. This article is part of a series entitled “Adventures in Race Relations”, portraying it as an ongoing struggle (which it very much was in 1954). Waters notes that Williams had originally come to Chicago for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair before founding the Jubilee Singers (which was also Abbott’s impetus for founding the Defender), re-establishing Chicago as a place where ordinary people could find success. Waters celebrates the Jubilee Singers’ use of “the power of music” to break down racial barriers, paralleling the Defender‘s use of poetry, music and other forms of art to portray Chicago as a center of Black culture. Williams’ group sought to adhere to the performance practices set by Fisk and to contribute to the perception of spirituals as art music. However, Waters’ emphasis of their impact on whites in small towns across the country and the context of the Defender‘s commitment to showing the contributions of ordinary Black people to Black culture serve to cast Williams’ Jubilee Singers as an important part of the Black struggle for acceptance by the white public.

References:

1 Waters, Enoc P. “Adventures in RACE RELATIONS: THE POWER OF MUSIC.” The Chicago Defender (National Edition) (1921-1967), Oct 23, 1954. https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/adventures-race-relations/docview/492959620/se-2.

2 The World Famous Williams’ Colored Singers. Chicago: Press of Rosenow Co., [ca. 1925].  Accessed online via RareAmericana.com, November 14, 2022. https://www.rareamericana.com/pages/books/3727978/williams-colored-singers/the-world-famous-williams-colored-singers?soldItem=true.

3 Brooks, Tim. “”Might Take One Disc of this Trash as a Novelty”: Early Recordings by the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Popularization of “Negro Folk Music”.” American Music 18, no. 3 (Fall, 2000): 278-316. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/might-take-one-disc-this-trash-as-novelty-early/docview/1374579/se-2.

4 Advertisement for the Williams Jubilee Singers, 1904-1910. UCLA Library Digital Collections. Accessed November 14, 2022. https://digital.library.ucla.edu/catalog/ark:/21198/z1418f71.

5 Snyder, Jean E.. Harry T. Burleigh : From the Spiritual to the Harlem Renaissance. Baltimore: University of Illinois Press, 2016. Accessed November 17, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.

6 Michaeli, Ethan. The Defender : How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America : from the Age of the Pullman Porters to the Age of Obama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

7 DeSantis, Alan D. “Selling the American Dream Myth to Black Southerners: The Chicago Defender and the Great Migration of 1915-1919.” Western Journal of Communication 62, no. 4 (Fall, 1998): 474-511. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/selling-american-dream-myth-black-southerners/docview/202724373/se-2.

How Posters Communicate Musical Identity

Musicians’ public reception begins before they play a single note. The advertisements for their performances preview who they are and what kind of music they make. I was captivated by a poster for a Fisk Jubilee Singers concert between 1910 and 1950, designed by Winold Reiss. The artwork offers insight into who they were performing for and what themes the performance might have had.

Winold Reiss, “[Graphic Design for Fisk Jubilee Singers.] [Concert Poster with Harp and Mask Motif],” still image, last modified 1910, accessed October 4, 2021, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/ resource/ppmsca.64409.

Before I sought recordings from the performance, I researched Winold Reiss, the poster’s creator. Reiss immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1913, three years after the earliest possible date this advertisement was published.1
While the Library of Congress lists 1910 as the earliest potential date of publication, the fact that Reiss had not yet moved to America makes this improbable. Still, he was devoted to non-white subjects, known for his portraits of the Blackfoot and Blood Indians of Canada and the northwestern United States. The Reiss Partnership summarizes the perspective he brought to his art, stating that,

“His idealism challenges the notion that as Americans we are anything less than “us,” a totality that includes rather than excludes.”2

To be clear, Reiss should not be seen as a sort of white savior just for making art that centers Black and Indigenous folks. However, his idea of creating an inclusive American identity mirrors the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ history, and later, this poster.

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Faces and Voices behind the Name

In class we spent a day discussing the origins of “black music” through the lens of white hypothesis. We spent time looking at the maps of slave songs through the states, a collection of southern folk music, as well as a map of the tours that the Fisk Jubilee Singers took in the late 1800s.

I had learned briefly about the Fisk Jubilee Singers back in my freshman musicology class and their story was one of the snippets of information that stuck with me after that class. I’m not entire sure why their story stuck with me. Perhaps it was the relatability to me of using music to afford college or perhaps the biblical reference to the book Leviticus with the history of the “year of Jubilee.” Whatever it might be I new I wanted to find out more.

As I researched the Jubilee singers I came to realize that all I had in mind of these strong-willed singers were a mixed gender group of people of color. For all of the time spent in class learning about them I had never stopped to imagine their faces. On top of that their voices never received the chance to be heard by the person learning about how they used their voices. I believe that an important aspect of researching is to create the setting of the topic. While backstory is a great place to begin, do you really know who you are researching. The image I chose was a print of what is believed to be the original Fisk Jubilee Singers. Their names are not encompassed by that title but also Isaac Dickerson, Ben Holmes, Greene Evans, Thomas Rutling, Ella Sheppard, Maggie Porter, Minnie Tate, Jennie Jackson, and Eliza Walker. Upon further research into their music I had come to realize I hadn’t listen to them either.

https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-128141/?

The link directly above brings you to a recording done by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1909. While this isn’t the original group of singers and while there isn’t a recording of those original singers, the Fisk University Jubilee Singers continue to sing today and uphold the legacy of the Jubilee Singers.

These two different sources allow a researcher to get to know their topic. When you look at the face of a human being and hear their voices, it becomes a personal research. It forces researchers to acknowledge their research topics as real people regardless of how long ago. In our class’s ties to discussion on race and identity today it is a reminder of the importance of recognizing people of color as real human beings no matter how long ago they walked this earth. How can we easily conjure up images of George Washington and Ben Franklin but fail to have an image of Crazy Horse (beyond outfits), the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Frederick Douglas, or Robert Smalls?

Citations:

American Missionary Association, photographer by Black, James Wallace. Jubilee singers, Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn. / negative by Black. [Place not identified: Publisher not identified, ?] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2015650289/>.

Work, John Wesley, et al. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. 1909. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-128141/>.

African American Spirituals in post-slavery, pre-civil rights movement, America

Late 1800s through early 1900s America was not a great time to be African American. I am not meaning to imply that African Americans have ever had it particularly well in America, but African American welfare throughout American history is a topic of whose discussion would be well beyond the scope of this blog post. Nonetheless, despite any social and cultural forces acting against them, African Americans still managed to keep spirits up and fight for a better future for them and their children. One of the ways they did both of these things was through singing spirituals. In slave times, the spiritual served as a musical outlet with which to keep spirits high, (or at least as high as one can keep spirits while enslaved) and a way to spread hidden messages, frequently about the Underground Railroad, without the slave-drivers realizing. After the Civil War, spirituals continued to aid in keeping spirits high, but took on the additional role of being a powerful force with which people used to fight for civil rights. One example of this is the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

Fisk Jubilee Singers Program2

The Fisk Jubilee Singers can be heard in this recording1 singing the spiritual Golden Slippers. They were a group of singers from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee who became well-known after touring the United States and the world singing spirituals. However, one of the less remembered parts of their legacy is that of their civil rights tours from 1879 to 1882.2 As can be heard in the recording, the Fisk Jubilee Singers brought a style of singing and harmony to the white world that had been previously unknown and, in the process, won international fame for their university. While the Fisk Jubilee Singers were by not means the only African American musical ensemble singing spirituals,3 they are the most famous and remembered example to this day

1 http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/recordings/detail/id/1815

2 Seroff, D. (2001). “A voice in the wilderness”: The fisk jubilee singers’ civil rights tours of 1879-1882. Popular Music and Society, 25(1), 131-177. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/208067875?accountid=351

The Fisk Jubilee Singers and Their First Record

http://media.loc.gov/playlist/view/5A9DB5B664340160E0538C93F1160160

In 1871, George White organized the Fisk Jubilee Singers at Fisk University in Tennessee, in order to raise money for the school. They were a group of black students from Fisk University who performed spirituals in the concert setting. While previous black concert artists performed standard white repertoire, the Fisk Jubilee Singers gave performances of black music, and this music did not follow the prevalent minstrel stereotypes. In 1898, John Wesley Work II, a later director of the group, helped get the Fisk Jubilee Singers recorded. This recording here is “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which was one of the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ best tunes of the time.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers had a major influence on the introduction of the spiritual into American repertoire, but the group had to adapt their style in order to have that effect. The director of the group, John Work, carried out a deal with Victor Talking Machine Company in hopes of reaching a wider audience. In Richard Crawford’s America’s Musical Life, he states that the purpose of the Fisk Jubilee Singers was to bring the history of Southern slaves into the present culture of Northern urban Protestants. The Jubilee singers dressed very properly and were polished in both behavior and musicality. They also didn’t sing in a dialect. This recording from Victor seems to have the typical sound of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, but it may not be representative of how the slaves in fields would have sung these songs. The Fisk Jubilee Singers were working against preexisting stereotypes and a racist society, so they found a more appealing sound that still maintained the idealized fervor of slave music to resonate with the white audiences. This reflects the idea of white people adapting music from other cultures or forcing others to match their own tastes of music, like we can see with Theodore F. Seward’s arrangement of Go Down Moses, in that it takes a standard spiritual and sets it within white hymnody.

While they did everything they could to appeal to their white audience, and were successful in that, they were still not always taken seriously. Even the Victor record company claimed that “they sometimes excite to laughter by their quaint conceptions of religious ideas.” The white audiences thought of them as novelties. Yet, Victor praises the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ emotional appeal to all. We should be grateful for the contributions of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, as they helped with the acceptance, development, and preservation of spirituals. It is also important to acknowledge their struggles in promoting this music and how that has affected the development of the genre.

Sources

Brooks, Tim. Lost Sounds. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Accessed October 2, 2017. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.5406/j.ctt2jcc81.19.pdf?refreqid=search%3Ab6add585f9e3810555f5c47c576075a2

Crawford, Richard. America’s Musical Life. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001.

Fisk University Jubilee Singers. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Victor B-8420, 1909. mp3 Accessed October 2, 2017. http://media.loc.gov/playlist/view/5A9DB5B664340160E0538C93F1160160

Roy, William G. Reds, Whites, and Blues. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Accessed October 2, 2017. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/j.ctt7rgqw.5.pdf?refreqid=search%3Aeac284c272f71c57421ddda9fc0c5238

 

“Room Enough” [unless you’re black]: The Fisk Jubilee Singers and Hypocrisy

Screen Shot 2015-02-23 at 9.34.59 PMOh, brothers, don’t stay away, . . .
For my Lord says there’s room enough,
Room enough in the Heav’ns for you,
My Lord says there’s room enough,
Don’t stay away.”

Oh, the irony. As the widely acclaimed Fisk Jubilee Singers preached this message of welcome to thousands of concertgoers, yes, they themselves were met with respect and praise by audiences, but all too often they were also greeted with closed doors.

In 1872, only a year after the ensemble began touring the United States and only a few days after receiving “continuous ovation” as guests of the governor of Connecticut, they were turned out of a tavernkeeper’s hostelry. When the Jubilee Singers booked the rooms, he assumed they were a company of blackface minstrels. Upon discovering they were the real deal, not a group of white people engaged in cruel mimicry, he could no longer stomach hosting them. A scathing account of this incident appearing in the March 14, 1872, edition of New York’s The Independent mocks the “publican” tavernkeeper for showing more respect to the “burnt cork of the harlequin,” the blackface of minstrelsy, than the “pigment . . . of [the Creator’s] own hands”:

Screen Shot 2015-02-24 at 5.24.05 AMA similar incident, layered in even greater irony, occurred in Jersey City later that same year. Mr. Warner, the proprietor of the American House, a place most would assume to be welcoming to Americans of all colors, had a misspelled cable sent to the Jubilee Singers’ sponsor, the Amercian [sic] Missionary Association, saying:

Screen Shot 2015-02-24 at 5.30.29 AM

After insulting the intellect of Mr. Warner and his clerk, The Independent writer rightly wrote, ” Somebody ought to teach this patriot to spell “American” a little less violently.”

In 1880, they were refused at the St. Nicholas Hotel in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, IL. The Springfield audience greeted this news with hisses and cries of “shame!”

Perhaps the greatest example of a mixed welcome occurred two years later during their visit to Washington, D.C. After they were turned out of numerous hotels in the nation’s capital, they wandered the city until midnight, when they managed to find lodging in private homes. A few days later, they were at the White House at the invitation of President Chester A. Arthur. The Singers brought the president to tears with a performance of “Steal Away to Jesus” and the Lord’s Prayer. “I have never in my life been so much moved,” said the president.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj6Jm7V9g6E

Honestly, I am disgusted with such behavior. After the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, I would hope that African Americans would be treated with more respect and dignity. Instead I see a distinct laziness shown by the public. Before the war, slaves would entertain Southerners at the plantation house, performing for no money and being told where they could and couldn’t stay. After the war, freedmen would entertain Northerners at concert halls, performing for money and being told where they could and couldn’t stay.

As a culture, we seem to deal best with small changes: from plantation houses to concert halls, from no money to admission prices. We say all we want, using overblown platitudes to demonstrate our support for a cause, but we do as little as we can, avoiding actions that put any kind of strain on our time, budgets, or attitudes, even if a small change on our part could change someone else’s life. Look to the examples of the people of Springfield, President Arthur, and the writers, and go even farther: back up your words with actions. Otherwise, you’re only a hypocrite.


Sources

“THE JUBILEE SINGERS.” The Independent …Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, History, Literature, and the Arts (1848-1921) 24, no. 1215 (Mar 14, 1872): 4. http://search.proquest.com/docview/90171741?accountid=351.

“THE JUBILEE SINGERS AND THE WASHINGTON LANDLORDS.” New York Evangelist (1830-1902) 53, no. 12 (Mar 23, 1882): 2.

“THE JUBILEE SINGERS AT THE HOME AND TOMB OF LINCOLN.” Christian Union (1870-1893) 22, no. 8 (Aug 25, 1880): 156. http://search.proquest.com/docview/137032063?accountid=351.

Marsh, J. B. T. The Story of the Jubilee Singers: With Their Songs. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1876. Accessed February 23, 2015. https://archive.org/.

“President Arthur and the Jubilee Singers.” Church’s Musical Visitor (1871-1883) 11, no. 6 (03, 1882): 162. http://search.proquest.com/docview/137466484?accountid=351.http://search.proquest.com/docview/125358571?accountid=351.

Oneida Community and the Fisk Jubilee Singers

 

OneidaCommunityHomeBld

 

From 1848 to 1881, the Oneida Community resided just outside Oneida, NY. Founded by extremely religious preacher John Humphrey Noyes, the community strived to lead its life parallel to the ideals of Perfectionism, in which its member “persevered in a course of self-improvement, overcoming many obstacles.”1 Among some of Noyes’s greater ideals, he lived to help the anti-slavery cause. In The Hand-book of Oneida Community, Noyes states, “My heart was greatly engaged in [anti-slavery] work. At Andover I had become interested in the Anti-Slavery cause, and soon after I went to New Haven I took part, with a few pioneer abolitionists, in the formation of one of the earliest Anti-Slavery Societies in the country.”2 Certainly J. H. Noyes invigorated the members of his community to think in the same way.

Yet, in the copy of the Oneida Circular Newspaper printed on April 15, 1872, author H W B wrote a review when a group of nine African-American singer from Fisk University, called Fisk Jubilee Singers, came to perform at Oneida. H W B and quoted author Theo F. Seward, in this article, use words, such as pathetic, unfortunates, wholly untutored minds, and phrases like “As to the words which accompany their songs, they are even more broken and irregular than is the music,” and “The reason for [their success] cannot apparently be traced to the superior talent of the singer themselves” as the author only believes that three of four of them have nice voices, to describe the Fisk Jubilee Singers.3

How, then, can one say that the Oneida community was really built of J. H. Noyes’s fascination of the anti-slavery movement? It seems that the community members have a problem with allowing the African-American singers to be on a level ground with whites. As mentioned before, the author stated that the students had “wholly untutored minds,” although they all studying at Fisk University. I believe that shows that the Oneida Community had fallen away from its markers original ideals.

1 Oneida Community, Hand-book of the Oneida Community: With a Sketch of Its Founder, and an Outline of Its Constitution and Doctrines. (Wallingford, Conn. : Office of the Circular, Wallingford Community, 1867) 8 .

2 Ibid., 7.

3 H, W. B. “The Jubilee Singers.” Oneida Circular (1871-1876) 9, no. 16 (Apr 15, 1872): 126. http://search.proquest.com/docview/137675405?accountid=351.

Questions of Originality and “The Genesis of the Negro Spiritual”

When the Fisk Jubilee Singers began to perform “slave songs” on their tours, this style exploded in popularity and was hailed as a rejuvenating form of American song. Additionally, these songs were accepted as a legitimate contribution to American music by African Americans and weren’t subject to the sort of derision that other forms of African art had been in the recent past. Unsurprisingly, many people had problems with the notion that these slave songs were the slaves own work, and numerous music critics and commentators voiced concerns that this music comprised of unoriginal rehashes of white, European descended hymnody.

Perhaps the champion of this ‘white defense’ was George Pullen Jackson (1874-1953), American folksong scholar who specialized in southern shape note singing. His belief in the need for white reclamation of spirituals coalesced most famously in his 1933 book White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands, but the most upsetting and clearly politicized version of his argument came a year earlier in the article “The Genesis of the Negro Spiritual”, published in the controversial and irreverent magazine The American Mercury.

Screen Shot 2015-02-22 at 9.19.43 PMScreen Shot 2015-02-22 at 9.23.15 PM

Left: The opening of Jackson’s article. Right: Comparisons of colonial song tunes and camp meeting variations.

Frustrated by what he perceives as an unfair appropriation of camp revivalist songs, Jackson offers textual and musical examples that are meant to show how spirituals were updated by upland revivalist preachers and singers with “simplicity and swing”. It wasn’t until the early 1800s and the involvement of Africans in these same meetings that Jackson claims the same revivalist musical tendencies and crowd emotionalism “infected the blacks.” He also belatedly accuses plantation owners and urban Southerners “who have always been eager to forget and disown the camp-meeting songs” of obscuring the truth in an attempt to disparage poor, rural whites.

Arguably the most upsetting part of the article addresses “the chief remaining argument of the die-hards for the Negro source of the Negro spirituals – the artistic merit of these songs.” Claiming that these rural whites were as musical and as “oppressed” as their Afro-American counterparts, he effectively reduces the body of Black music he is discussing to cheap parodies of purer, more original white music. Yet despite his apparent certainty in tracing the misunderstood development of the spiritual, he concedes the vast chasm of knowledge that existed between his time and the musical era he was studying, though he seems to suggest that this chasm only manifests for those seeking to promote the “superiority” of Black music.

George-Pullen-Jackson-leads-a-sing

Jackson leads a group of singers in sacred harp songs in Tennessee, 1941

Jackson made a career out of the white reclamation of spirituals. Mentioned earlier was his White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands, though the misleadingly titled White and Negro Spirituals: their Life Span and Kinship (1943) is notable for its treatment of Negro music only as “variants” on white originals. Additionally, Jackson collaborated with Alan Lomax to record performances of large southern singing groups such as the Sacred Harp Singers, presumably as a more authentic representation of the southern spirituals.

While it may be infuriating to reflect upon the writings of Jackson and other anti-Black critics, it is an important part of American musical culture that should not be ignored. By critically analyzing these sources we can gain a clearer picture of how politics and cultural aggressions infiltrated American music from an early stage.

Note: For the purposes of the assignment “The Genesis of the Negro Spiritual” was discovered via the Readers’ Guide Retrospective. However, the full PDF was unavailable and was instead found at the following link: http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmMercury-1932jun-00243.

SOURCES

Jackson, George Pullen. “The Genesis of the Negro Spiritual.” The American Mercury (June 1932): pp. 243-249.

Jackson, George Pullen. White and Negro Spirituals: their Life Span and Kinship.

Jackson, Richard. “George Pullen Jackson.” Grove Music Online. http: www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed February 22, 2015).

One for the Money, Two for the Show – The Fisk University Jubilee Singers

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Founded in 1866 by the American Missionary Association, Fisk University in Nashville, TN became the United States’ first “black” university.  Formed in the Reconstruction era of America, Fisk was a school that would “offer a liberal arts education to young men and women irrespective of color.” Fisk University, however, did not avoid hardships as the institution struggled to survive past its infancy. Within five years, the school found itself in dire need for financial support. So what does any university do when they need to make money?  They form a touring ensemble.

Screen-Shot-2013-06-20-at-10.51.07-AMGeorge L. White was originally hired to serve as Fisk’s treasurer, but also found his way into the music classroom. Noticing the institution’s need for income, the treasurer turned music professor also became the school’s first director of choirs.  In 1871, White established a choir of freed slaves that he later named the Jubilee Singers. The choir’s purpose was to go and tour the country to raise money for the university.  Ella Shepard, the ensemble’s pianist, described the intentions and drive of White was “to sing the money out of the hearts and pockets of the people,” and with that, on October 6, 1871, the choir left Nashville on their first benefit concert tour of the Midwest.

Long story short, the seven month tour was a resounding success. The ensemble wasFisk_University,_Jubilee_Hall,_Seventeenth_Avenue,_North,_Nashville_(Davidson_County,_Tennessee) able to return to Nashville with $20,000 to be put into the institution.  With the profit of their first tour, Fisk University was able to build it’s first permanent campus building, which was named Jubilee Hall and still serves the university to this day. So what exactly did the Jubilee Singers do to make their tour so successful? Simply put, they sang what they knew and what the people wanted to hear.

According to an article published in the Oneida Circular, the praise of the ensemble is simply “remarkable.” The singers did not have “superior talent” and though “they Screen Shot 2015-02-21 at 10.30.10 AMare capable of singing ‘popular music’,” that had nothing to do with their success. What consistently worked for the ensemble was to defer to their “native, religious songs.” Described in one concert advertisement as the “simple melodies and spiritual songs which sustained the slaves during their long years of bondage,” the music of the Jubilee Singers captivated audiences with their novel sound and religious messages. When asked about their music by members of the public, the singers would respond that “it was never written down” and that is passed down “from generation to generation” within their families. This repertoire, coined “slave songs” would not only carry the ensemble through a successful tour, but also skyrocket them to the national and international stage.

getimageThe concept of a touring ensemble is not exactly new. Here at St. Olaf College, we too have a touring choral ensemble of our own. Under the direction of Dr. Anton Armstrong, the St. Olaf Choir tours annually across the country and occasionally around the globe. Known for their refined tone and lyric sense of line, the St. Olaf Choir is a night-and-day comparison to the Jubilee Singers. Even though their musical styles contrast greatly, their underlying reasonings for going on national and international tours are quite similar: to spread their music and to collect revenue for their sponsoring institutions. Founded 40 years after the Jubilee Singers in 1912, the St. Olaf Choir and their director F. Melius Christiansen took their first major tour in 1920 to the East coast and had a similar result to the Fisk musicians, bringing in a healthy sum of revenue for the college and even established a fund to construct the first official music hall on campus. What is particularly interesting is that both choirs had similar repertoire at the commencement of their tours. Classical choral music was to be the highlight of the Jubilee Singers program, but the hesitantly had to switch to singing their people’s history on stage in order to raise the necessary funds. Both ensembles had hugely successful tours singing what the audience wanted to hear, but is that necessarily right?

Screen Shot 2015-02-21 at 11.42.40 AMRegardless of your viewpoint on the ethics of choral repertoire when it comes to “selling” sound, the Fisk University Jubilee Singers have surely made their mark on our country’s history. More than 75 years after the Jubilee Singers inaugural tour, G. Robert Tipton wrote an article for The Missionary Herald in 1947, which was later re-published in Reader’s Digest in 1949, titled “Our Debt to the Jubilee Singers.” The article goes through a brief history of the ensemble from their establishment through their first European tour, but what I found most interesting was the summary sentence provided on the front page of the article.  Tipton writes that the Jubilee Singers are “a group of impoverished ex-slaves who took the old Negro spirituals on the road – and enriched America’s musical heritage.” There is no doubt that the work of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers has not only  enriched our nation’s musical antiquity, but quite possibly assisted in the preservation of the “slave song” genre that is so deeply rooted in America’s history.

 Sources:

TIPTON, G. Robert. 1949. “Our debt to the Jubilee singers.” Reader’s Digest 54, 95-97. Readers’ Guide Retrospective: 1890-1982 (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost (accessed February 19, 2015).

Advertisement 18 — no title. 1872. Zion’s Herald (1868-1910). Mar 14, http://search.proquest.com/docview/127336562?accountid=351 (accessed February 20, 2015).

H, W. B. 1872. THE JUBILEE SINGERS. Oneida Circular (1871-1876). Apr 15, http://search.proquest.com/docview/137675405?accountid=351 (accessed February 20, 2015).

“Fisk Jubilee Singers – Our History.” Fisk Jubilee Singers. Accessed February 24, 2015. http://www.fiskjubileesingers.org/our_history.html.
Shaw, Joseph M. The St. Olaf Choir: A Narrative. Northfield, Minn.: St. Olaf College, 1997.