The Fisk Concert Spiritual

This chapter explores the process of musically and culturally translating oral folk spirituals into notated arranged spirituals performed on the concert stage. The American Missionary Association hired people’s song composer and church musician Theodore F. Seward to transcribe the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ spirituals as arranged for them by their director, George L. White. Using Seward’s transcriptions as well as those by Jubilee Singers Ella Sheppard and Thomas Rutling, plus reviews and primary sources, as well as early recordings, this chapter recreates as far as possible the performance practice of the concert spirituals sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers on their tours. The reception of the Fisk Jubilee Singers is surveyed through numerous reviews and is interpreted to show how a codified discourse about spirituals was created in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which stressed, for example, primitivism, wildness, nature, and the inherent musicality of the African race.

Innovators, Imitators, and a Jubilee Industry

The ever-growing success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers attracted widespread notice, and by 1873–1874 the troupe was facing a field of competitors, some of whom made innovations to the concert presentation of spirituals and others of whom were content to imitate the Fisk Jubilee Singers in style and repertory. Among the innovators were the Hampton Institute Singers, directed by Thomas P. Fenner. Their repertory was largely distinct from that of the Fisk singers, and they sang in a more folk-oriented performance style, as evidenced by the fact that they had a “shout leader” and sang in dialect. Another group of innovators was the Tennesseans (1874), directed by John Wesley Donavin, who sang in support of Central Tennessee College in Nashville. Their popularity rested on the supposed authenticity of what they billed as their “slave cabin concerts”—not a Fisk service of song but meant to be a naturalistic representation of slave life. The Tennesseans’ bass singer Leroy Pickett made many of their arrangements, becoming one of the earliest black arrangers of concert spirituals; later he became acting musical director. Imitators, on the other hand, reproduced the repertory and aesthetic of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. They included the Hyers sisters, who reoriented their programming of art songs to include spirituals so that they could complete with other black singers at the time, as well as the Shaw Jubilee Singers, New Orleans Jubilee Singers, Jackson Jubilee Singers, Old Original North Carolinians (managed by T. H. Brand), and Sheppard’s Colored Jubilee Singers. With all of these groups, a jubilee entertainment industry began to take shape in 1872 to 1874, as performance norms were established and as organizations like lyceum bureaus began to add jubilee troupes to their roster.

Music

This chapter examines Negro music as well as musicians such as singers, instrumentalists, directors, and composers in Illinois in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It begins with a discussion of various Negro musicians in Illinois, from piano prodigy “Blind Tom” Wiggins and the Hampton Singers to the Fisk Jubilee Singers and choral groups known for singing spirituals. Among them were the Chicago Choral Study Club, one of the first to perform the works of black composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. The chapter also considers the emergence of organized music schools among Chicago Negroes, including the Coleridge-Taylor Music School and the National Conservatory of Music, as well as church choirs, musical clubs and associations.

Burleigh’s Music Experience and Training in Erie

This chapter focuses on Harry T. Burleigh's music experience and training in Erie. Burleigh demonstrated his love for music and his gifts as a singer long before he left Erie to study at the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. Music education at home and in studios opened doors for Burleigh to a variety of performance venues that prepared him for his successful audition at the National Conservatory and the rigorous course of study he would pursue there. Along the way he earned the support of many of Erie's prominent citizens, who would contribute to a fund supporting the early months of his training in New York City. This chapter examines when and where Burleigh heard and sang spirituals and what exposure he had to black musicians who toured the country, including the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the Hampton Juiblee Singers, James Monroe Trotter, and the Hyers Sisters.

THE TENOR OF BELONGING: THE FISK JUBILEE SINGERS AND THE POPULAR CULTURES OF POSTBELLUM CITIZENSHIP

“The Tenor of Belonging” examines the origins of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a chorus of college students from Fisk University, amidst the official promises of the Reconstruction era, as well as their reception during their first national tour in 1871 and 1872. The article explores the bifurcated meanings behind the spiritual as the singers performed it in this new context. Publicly, it became, for well-to-do white Northern audiences, an image of a quintessential American identity rooted in the soil, “primitive Christianity,” and the trope of redemption through suffering that seemed increasingly threatened in modern, incorporated America. And yet, spirituals had embodied ideals of self-making, piety, communal solidarity, and liberation for their singers since the late eighteenth century; and performing them, as the Jubilee Singers did, likewise became a vehicle for achieving financial security after the Civil War, as the chorus marketed its past in an effort to secure its future. The singers, like their slave forebears, used the spiritual to achieve a level of autonomy, cohesion, and pride as they negotiated the contours of citizenship in a reconfigured nation. As such, their work both prefigures Booker T. Washington's “bootstraps” ethos and W.E.B. Du Bois's “double-consciousness.”