The Fisk Jubilee Singers were nine student musicians from Fisk University who left Nashville on October 6, 1871, with almost no money, no reputation, and no guarantee they would come back. Most of them were formerly enslaved. Several were still teenagers. Their goal was to save their school, which was on the verge of financial collapse. They did that, and in doing it they introduced the American spiritual to the world.
Why They Existed
Fisk University had opened in January 1866 in the decaying barracks of a former Union Army hospital in Nashville, built to educate people who had just been freed from slavery. By 1871, just five years in, the school was in serious trouble. The barracks were falling apart, the campus was inadequate, and the American Missionary Association that funded Fisk could not keep up with the costs. The school needed either a new campus or it would close.
George L. White, Fisk’s choir director and treasurer, proposed a solution that most reasonable people would have dismissed immediately: take the best student singers on the road, charge admission, and raise enough money to survive. White had been working with student choral groups since 1867 and believed the music could move audiences.
On October 6, 1871, nine students left Fisk with the school’s remaining operating funds in their pockets. White named them the Jubilee Singers, after the biblical “year of jubilee” described in Leviticus, a year of liberation and return. The name was intentional.
The Original Nine
The original group included Ella Sheppard, a pianist who served as assistant director and de facto musical leader of the tour; Jennie Jackson; Maggie Porter; Minnie Tate; Eliza Walker; Greene Evans; Isaac Dickerson; Thomas Rutling; and Benjamin Holmes, who was fighting tuberculosis throughout the tour.
Ella Sheppard’s story stands as representative of the group. Her father had been a free man who bought his own freedom and his daughter’s, but could not afford to free her mother. Sheppard received piano lessons as a child, but was required to enter through the back door of her teacher’s home and was instructed never to reveal who was teaching her. She became a pianist of genuine ability. At Fisk, she was one of the central figures of every tour.
What Happened on the Road
The early tour was not a success. The group toured small churches and music halls, performing popular songs of the day, barely meeting expenses. Hotels frequently refused to house them because of their race. A touring agent had a nervous breakdown under the pressure. White himself nearly died of a pulmonary hemorrhage. The tour was close to being abandoned.
The turning point came on November 16, 1871, at Oberlin College in Ohio, where the Jubilee Singers were performing before a national convention of ministers. After a set of standard ballads, they sang spirituals. Ella Sheppard later recalled that none of them had planned to sing the spirituals publicly. These were songs their parents had sung in worship and in the fields, songs considered private and sacred. But under pressure to find material that connected, they sang them.
The reaction was immediate. Henry Ward Beecher, the most prominent preacher in America, heard the group and urged his congregation to give generously. After that concert, they began consistently performing spirituals, and audiences responded with something close to revelation. White audiences in the Northeast had no idea these songs existed.
The first American tour earned $40,000 for Fisk University by May 1872. It paid off the school’s debts and funded the purchase of a new campus on the former site of Fort Gillem, two miles northwest of downtown Nashville.
Europe and Queen Victoria
In 1873, the group grew to eleven members and sailed to England for a European tour. They performed for Prime Minister William Gladstone and Queen Victoria. Victoria was so moved that she commissioned a floor-to-ceiling portrait of the original Jubilee Singers, which she then donated to Fisk. It hangs in Jubilee Hall today.
The British tour raised approximately $50,000, which funded construction of Jubilee Hall, Fisk’s first permanent building. Jubilee Hall opened in 1876 and is now a National Historic Landmark. It was the first building in the United States constructed specifically to provide higher education for African Americans.
The Music and What It Meant
What the Jubilee Singers introduced to white audiences was not entertainment in the conventional sense. Negro spirituals, or slave songs, were the music of people who had been prohibited by law from learning to read, who had encoded protest and grief and hope into melodies that could be sung without revealing their content to those in power. Songs like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Steal Away,” and “This Little Light of Mine” were heard by white audiences for the first time through these performances.
The Library of Congress added the Jubilee Singers’ 1909 recording of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” to the United States National Recording Registry in 2002. The group received the National Medal of Arts in 2008, presented at the White House by President George W. Bush. In 2021, the Fisk Jubilee Singers won their first Grammy Award at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards.
The original group disbanded in 1878, exhausted after seven years of relentless touring. Several members’ health had been permanently damaged. The school they saved still exists. The Fisk Jubilee Singers continue to perform as a touring ensemble of Fisk University students.
Sources
- Wikipedia: “Fisk Jubilee Singers” (en.wikipedia.org)
- Tennessee Encyclopedia: “Jubilee Singers of Fisk University” (tennesseeencyclopedia.net)
- PBS American Experience: “Jubilee Singers: Sacrifice and Glory” (pbs.org)
- Smithsonian Music: “The Fisk Jubilee Singers: Preserving African American Spirituals” (music.si.edu)
- Tennessee State Museum: “Who Are the Fisk Jubilee Singers?” (tnmuseum.org)
- National Endowment for the Arts: “Fisk Jubilee Singers” (arts.gov)
- Britannica: “Fisk Jubilee Singers” (britannica.com)
- Walnut Hills Historical Society: “Fisk Jubilee Singers, October 6, 1871” (walnuthillsstories.org)