In 1873, a choir of African American students – all but two of them former slaves – set off for London on a fund-raising tour. Recommended by Mark Twain, who wrote “I would walk seven miles to hear them sing again … they reproduce the true melody of the plantations”, the Fisk Jubilee Singers went on to give concerts across Europe and beyond, thereby introducing spirituals to the world.
In England, the prime minister William Gladstone invited them for a private breakfast. Queen Victoria put in a special request for them to sing Steal Away, and it has become part of Nashville folklore that it was the Queen’s delighted praise that gave the choir’s Tennessee hometown the soubriquet Music City.
She also packed them off with a grand memento of their visit: a massive group portrait commissioned from her official portraitist, Edmund Havell, which takes pride of place today in the university building that the 11 singers and their director, George White, financed with their gruelling two-year tour. “To me,” wrote one of Fisk University’s most famous students, the sociologist and civil rights activist WEB Dubois, “Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil.”
Though the original group disbanded after arriving home, a new one was soon formed and has been running ever since. One of their party tricks is to restage the Havell portrait in full Victorian rig for graduation ceremonies, but they also have a more serious mission that has kept them on the road for 150 years. “The music we sing today helps to bridge the gap between Africans and African Americans,” says Professor Paul Kwami, a Ghanaian who studied at Fisk and has been the Singers’ musical director for 25 years. Under his leadership they have backed Neil Young and Emmylou Harris, and continue to perform the same repertoire of spirituals, from Go Down Moses to Nobody Knows the Trouble I See, in about 30 concerts a year, with a current six-date tour sweeping them from New York to Nashville.
But their story is not only important for the US. Archives across the UK bear traces of a trailblazing visit that has otherwise been all but forgotten. In Scotland they not only sang in Edinburgh but sailed out to entertain the islanders of Bute. One of the singers, the tenor Thomas Rutling, settled in Harrogate. In Hackney, London – where I live – they gave several performances, inspiring a local ragged school to set up the UK’s first gospel choir.
My own fascination with their story began when I was asked to help out with the libretto of an oratorio by composer Harvey Brough and librettist Justin Butcher. They had been working from an 1888 book unearthed by the Gospel historian Viv Broughton, which told the story largely from the perspective of White, a former Union cavalry officer who became the treasurer of the fledgling university at a point when it consisted of a huddle of old civil war army barracks. There must have been a moment, says Brough, when the singers took control, realising that their own music was more powerful than the white repertoire with which they had started out (featuring such long-forgotten gems as WE Bradbury’s Esther – The Beautiful Queen).
And there, suddenly, it was, in a doubly documented account of an encounter between the singers and the college president in 1871. “One day,” wrote the president, “there came into my room a few students with some air of mystery. The door was shut and locked, the window curtains were drawn, and, as if a thing they were ashamed of, they sang some of the old-time religious slave songs now long since known as Jubilee songs.”
The story is picked up in the diaries of Ella Sheppard, who would become lead soprano, accompanist and onstage director of the Jubilee Singers: “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.”
It was an encounter that altered the course of musical history. As Kwami puts it, “the Fisk Jubilee Singers changed the Negro spiritual into an art form and introduced it to the world”. During their travels, they also challenged racial prejudice and, on some notable occasions, forced changes in the law. George Pullman himself intervened to end segregated seating on his trains after the singers were refused first-class seats. And Jersey City voted to integrate its schools after an unpleasant run-in with a local hotelier. “By their sweet songs and simple ways,” wrote the New Jersey Journal, “the Jubilee Singers are moulding and manufacturing public sentiment.”
With such financial and artistic success, it didn’t take long for imitators to get going, resulting in the Fisk Jubilee Singers being forced to trademark themselves. Nevertheless, says Kwami, “people are still discovering the story”. Dubois had no doubts about their importance, cementing them into the foundations of the civil rights movement by devoting a chapter of his 1903 classic The Souls of Black Folk to them. “Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood,” he wrote. “Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving? Would America have been America without her Negro people?”
It is a message that still rings out clear, true and urgent in the increasingly intolerant climate of today – not only in America but across the world.
• Freedom Song, by Harvey Brough and Justin Butcher, will be performed at the Hackney Empire, London, on 24 March.
