The New York Times today has an interesting story on the history of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Fisk University is one of the oldest Historically Black Colleges and Universities being founded a year after the Civil War ended as the Fisk Free Colored School . Margaret Rankl’s article includes the painting above commissioned by Queen Victoria. Below are excerpts from her article:
In an account of her years as assistant director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Ella Sheppard, a gifted musician who had been enslaved as a child, recalled one of the student ensemble’s earliest excursions outside Nashville, only a handful of years after the Civil War. The singers were all students at Fisk University, a school for emancipated former slaves. They were stranded at a rural train station with Ms. Sheppard and their director, a white abolitionist named George White, when an angry mob arrived. In the face of the white men’s fury, the students began to sing.
“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.”
When I stepped into Jubilee Hall on the campus of Fisk University last week, 150 years after the original Fisk Jubilee Singers sang a racist mob into silence, the lobby of the historic building was under renovation and covered in drop cloths. There was no sign directing me to the rehearsal space of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, whom I had come to hear, but a student soon appeared to lead me through the halls. “I’m Hezekiah,” he said. “One of the tenors.”
Hezekiah Robinson, a junior, may look like an ordinary college student at this historically Black university, but he sings like an angel. In fact, the Fisk Jubilee Singers is an entire ensemble of angels occupying the bodies of undergraduates. They have been bringing audiences to tears for the last 150 years with their renditions of the spirituals first sung by enslaved Americans before the Civil War.
This year has been extraordinary for the group. In March their new album, “Celebrating Fisk!” received a Grammy Award for the Best Roots Gospel album. In September, an anonymous donor gave $1.5 million to establish a permanent endowment to support the ensemble. At the 20th annual Americana Music Awards, also in September, the Fisk Jubilee Singers received the Legacy of Americana Award. This week it will celebrate its sesquicentennial, an anniversary that Nashville Public Television has commemorated with a new performance film called “Walk Together Children.”
Fisk University opened its doors in 1866, shortly after the end of the Civil War. It was run by white abolitionist missionaries and operated in the barracks of an abandoned military hospital in Nashville. The school’s treasurer, George White, happened to love music and formed a student chorus, quickly tapping Ella Sheppard to serve as his assistant director.
From its founding, Fisk faced immense financial difficulties, and each year its prospects for survival were worse than the year before. During the fall of 1871, with the school on the verge of collapse, George White struck on the idea of forming a traveling company of his best singers. He felt sure that abolition-minded audiences along the route of the old Underground Railroad could hardly help reaching into their pockets to support the school, once they heard his students sing.
The company left Nashville on Oct. 6, a date now celebrated each year as Jubilee Day at Fisk, but the fund-raising tour did not go as George White had hoped. After weeks of performances, the tour wasn’t even breaking even, much less clearing the kind of profit that might save Fisk. The students, who owned no coats, were always cold and completely exhausted. Too often the local boardinghouses turned them away because they were Black.
Their performances had always included a few spirituals, generally used as encores. But the group’s fortunes finally improved when Mr. White persuaded Ella Sheppard and the students to add much more of the music of their youth to their traditional choral repertoire. It was not an easy sell.
These songs had been created by enslaved people and passed down through generations. For captives longing for freedom and safety and peace, they had been a source of solace and community, an expression of artistry and originality. For their children, cold and hungry and far from family, the songs were a reminder of home. But they were also a reminder of the very institution they had been working so hard to escape: The songs “were associated with slavery and the dark past, and represented the things to be forgotten,” wrote Ms. Sheppard. Nevertheless, they agreed.
Audiences were spellbound. “All of a sudden, there was no talking,” the musicologist Horace Boyer noted of a performance in 1871, the year the ensemble was formed. “They said you could hear the soft weeping.”
The current group of singers carries on their legacy. “This is not an ordinary choral ensemble,” music director Paul Kwami said in an interview after the rehearsal I visited. “If we are the ones to continue carrying this torch, then there has to be humility and not pride.”…
For the original Fisk Jubilee Singers, success eventually followed hardship: sellout crowds, generous donations, celebrity endorsements from the likes of Mark Twain and President Ulysses S. Grant. A subsequent tour of the British Isles included a performance for Queen Victoria, who was so entranced that she commissioned a portrait of the singers and presented it to Fisk University as a gift.
The Fisk Jubilee Singers accomplished what they had set out to do in 1871, saving their university from financial ruin. But they kept singing, earning enough to buy the land for a permanent Fisk University campus, as well, and then still more to build a stone and brick building strong enough to withstand the arsonists of the Ku Klux Klan. That building, Jubilee Hall, is where the Fisk Jubilee Singers rehearse these days, standing on a small stage that rises before Queen Victoria’s gift portrait of the original company.
Throughout their travels, the artistry and technical skill of these former slaves captivated, and in many cases shamed, white audiences. And the beauty of the “slave songs” themselves made it clear to everyone who heard them that Black Americans had developed their own emotionally rich and creatively diverse culture, despite the unthinkable deprivation, brutality and trauma of slavery.
During their travels in the Union states, the Fisk Jubilee Singers encountered virulent racism — a review in the New York World called them “trained monkeys” — but they were so beloved and so admired by audiences that often the effect of such overtly racist behavior was to shame some of these segregated communities into doing better. The ensemble inspired the integration of hotels and public schools, and George Pullman himself integrated the entire fleet of Pullman cars when the students were denied berths on trains.
Here is a look at the founding of the singers from a PBS documentary:
Excellent. I sought train travel experiences and found them here, as well as links to Pullman and Mark Twain. Lynda, poet