Writing in The Atlantic, Vann R. Newkirk II recounts the history of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the ensemble organized in 1871 to support Fisk University in Nashville, one of the institutions founded in the wake of the Civil War to educate newly freed Black Americans.
“For their early performances – in Nashville, Memphis, and Cincinnati – the singers mostly pulled from a repertoire of standard popular songs designed to showcase their equality with white choirs and to impress any sophisticates in the audience,” Newkirk writes.
Meanwhile, “[m]ostly in private, the singers had been practicing a new repertoire, songs that the majority of [W]hite people had never heard. They cobbled together snatches of work songs and ‘sorrow songs’ that many of the students, or their parents, had learned in the fields while enslaved.”
The impact of these songs was immediate and lasting. The Fisk Jubilee Singers toured internationally, raising $100,000 for the struggling Tennessee school, and their performances made the Negro spirituals, formally arranged and notated for the first time by the Fisk ensemble, “a national art form,” Newkirk writes. “Spirituals such as ‘Steal Away’ became the core of the Jubilee Singers’ performances, and this expanding repertoire became the basis for the songbook of standards that still graces Black churches today.”
The spirituals resonate through all the music we now hear as “American.” The songs that Mark Twain called “the perfectest flower of the ages” became a musical template. The spirituals “prefigured the rise of the blues – a direct successor – as the first truly national popular music.”
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