Portrait of the Fisk Jubilee Singers - 1875
In my first years as a college choir director in the 1990's I had a vague but unexamined longing to conduct the African-American spirituals as a regular part of the music I would teach. I had spent most of my youth and young adult years playing bassoon in orchestras and bands instead of in choirs. So I had little first-hand experience with the choral repertoire until my doctoral studies at the University of Illinois. While there, I co-led my first choir collaboration, bringing together my predominantly white church choir and a predominantly black church choir from the other side of town directed by voice professor Ollie Watts Davis, who also founded (and still directs to this day) the university gospel choir.
Prof. Davis' church choir sang both gospel and spirituals. This exchange was also my introduction to black church traditions, even though I was already in my late 30's. Jubilant gospel songs of praise were primary in their repertoire, but I was especially drawn to the wide ranging and complex messages, emotional range, and history of the spirituals. The fact that most choral arrangements of the spirituals were unaccompanied also made them especially well-suited for a college choir that had to be ready to sing anywhere, with or without a keyboard.
But when I actually started conducting my own college choirs, my white students would often ask, "Is it really ok for us to sing the Spirituals without being descendants of the slaves from whose suffering those songs came to be?" Among secular progressives and academics, there was also an inclination to look critically upon the role of Christianity during slavery as having been a manipulative way to pacify their enslaved servants with promises of 'pie in the sky by and by' to make them accept the oppression of the moment.
(As an aside, In university music departments at the time, the Spirituals and other music of the African diaspora was also not considered particularly worthy of serious musical study. Spirituals were the light 'encores' saved for the end of choral and vocal programs. Gospel music was left to extra-curricular choirs where singers could damage their voices on their own time.)
But getting back to questions about the place of Christianity and the sacred songs in the community of the enslaved: I began to discover that the story was much more multi-layered and complex. Early writings by figures like Frederick Douglass in the 19th Century and W.E.B. DuBois in the 20th suggested that the slaves sang not only out of hope for deliverance in the next life, but out of a longing for justice and freedom in the here and now.
The 'Promised Land of Canaan' signified the free states of the north and Canada; the 'River Jordan' signified the Mason-Dixon line between Maryland and Pennsylvania, the "Master" frequently referred to was not just the plantation owner, but the Lord and Savior. The way of that Master was the Underground Railroad to freedom, as reimagined in John Dowell's photograph and songs for the "Night before the run" we saw and heard earlier this morning.
In 1845, Frederick Douglass wrote this about his days as a slave child on the plantation (in his first autobiography, Narrative of the live of Frederick Douglas, an American slave):
[The songs] told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep, they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains….[I] did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs.
Ten years later in his second telling of his story, My Bondage and Freedom, Douglass reflected further:
"A keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of 'O Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan' something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach the north – and the north was our Canaan....this was a favorite air and had a double meaning. In the lips of some, it meant the expectation of a speedy summons to a world of spirits; but in the lips of our company, it simply meant a speedy pilgrimage toward a free state, and deliverance from all the evils and dangers of slavery."
The slaves adapted Christian faith to their own African traditions and to the circumstances in which they found themselves. Along with their strong, personal identification with the crucified and risen Jesus, the Hebrew Bible's theme of liberation from oppression was understood to resonate deeply with their own story.
In his 1992 book The Spirituals and the Blues, scholar James Cone wrote:
Through song they built new structures for existence in an alien land. The spirituals enabled blacks to retain a measure of African identity while living in the midst of American slavery, providing both the substance and the rhythm to cope with human servitude.
Following the story further, I became aware that there was a personal way my students could connect to the tradition of the spirituals right here in the present day: the still thriving choral programs of the Historical Black Colleges and Universities. (At that time, I had never heard an HBCU choir at national or regional choral convention, thought that situation has since changed.) It happens that these songs sung in secret on plantations throughout the south in the decades before the Civil War first became known to the outside world through performances by HBCU choirs, starting with Fisk University in Nashville. Though as recently freed slaves, their circumstances couldn't have been more different, these young singers at Fisk were the same age as the students in my choir. The Spirituals as taught and led by an 18-year-old Ella Sheppard had become a core part not only of these new HBCU schools' curriculums, but choir tours became an important means of raising the funds needed to stay open.
So I wondered: if I reached out to a choir director at one of these schools, might they be open to a visit, and even better, a musical collaboration? Lucky for me, the first colleague I reached out to was Fisk professor and Jubilee Singers director Paul Kwami. Paul was more than willing to have us come to Nashville and sing with his choir.
Let's take a moment to watch some historical footage of the Fisk Jubilee Singers from the PBS American Experience series:
In this clip we hear today's Fisk Jubilee Singers sing "Swing low, sweet chariot" because legend has it that this was the song sung to Ella Sheppard's mother that saved both of their lives. We might associate this familiar song with longing for eternal rest in the hereafter. But in the story of Ella Sheppard, it is attached to saving the life of a young child with a prophecy that she was meant to do great things in this life; a young woman who would go on to lead a choir introducing the Spirituals throughout the United States and on to Queen Victoria and other European dignitaries.
A more explicitly "coded" Spiritual was also important in the history of the Fisk singers: "Steal Away, steal away to Jesus." On November 16, 1871, after struggling to draw attention to their concerts and the financial plight of the school, the choir was allowed to sit in the back balcony of Finney Chapel at Oberlin College in Ohio (my alma mater), before a national convention of church leaders. They weren't give the honor of a slot to present a concert, but during a short break in the proceedings, they quietly began to sing "Steal Away." Let's listen to the 2019 Fisk Jubilee's sing this early arrangement:
In 1903, W.E.B DuBois wrote of his experience of Fisk in his seminal book, The Souls of Black Folk (Chapter XIV):
“Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine. Then in the years when I came to Nashville I saw the great temple builded of these songs towering over the pale city. To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil. Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past.”
But as with many black enterprises, the brutality of the end of Reconstruction changed the way the spirituals would be shared. Among other factors, it was no longer safe for Ella Sheppard and other women to travel with the choir. It was not until the era of vinyl recordings that the Spirituals became more broadly heard again, now through an all-male quartet from Fisk and similar small male ensembles. Here's a 1909 Fisk Quartet recording of a spiritual that refers not only to the mansions of heaven but the fervently anticipated house of freedom:
This revival of the Spiritual in the early recorded era was no small blip on the screen. Some Fisk Quartet recordings for RCA and Columbia sold as many recordings as Caruso. But magazine advertisements for these recordings also had to share space with ads for recordings by blackface minstrel groups, the most popular form of mainstream entertainment at the time.
The concert spiritual was transformed once again in the 1920's through recordings of great African-American classical singers who sang majestic new arrangements of what were sometimes called the 'sorrow songs' by Black composers like Harry T. Burleigh. (As a young student of Antonin Dvorak at his new conservatory in New York, Burleigh inspired the Czech composer's famous "Going Home" English horn melody in his New World Symphony.)
Some of the sorrow songs carried coded messages, such as "Go down Moses," often associated with the great Harriet Tubman, known as the "Moses of her people" for leading many slaves to freedom on the underground railroad. Here it is sung by Roland Hayes, one of the early Fisk Jubilee singers who developed a career as a recitalist and composer long after his college days:
Some sorrow-songs served simply as a form of catharsis for slaves struggling to survive physical and psychological torments beyond the power of words to understand. W.E.B. DuBois wrote:
Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs sing true? - The Souls of Black Folk - Chapter XV
Here are two of the great African-American recitalists, both with Philadelphia roots, singing profound songs of sorrow:
But there was also another type of spiritual that was up-tempo and ecstatic in nature. DuBois again gives us an eloquent description:
...the Frenzy of “Shouting,” when the Spirit of the Lord passed by, and, seizing the devotee, made him mad with supernatural joy, was the last essential of Negro religion and the one more devoutly believed in than all the rest. It varied in expression from the silent rapt countenance or the low murmur and moan to the mad abandon of physical fervor,—the stamping, shrieking, and shouting, the rushing to and fro and wild waving of arms, the weeping and laughing, the vision and the trance. All this is nothing new in the world, but old as religion, as Delphi and Endor. And so firm a hold did it have on the Negro, that many generations firmly believed that without this visible manifestation of the God there could be no true communion with the Invisible. - The Souls of Black Folk - Chapter X
These "ring shout" spirituals really began their popularity in the 1930's, when choir directors such as William Dawson at the Tuskegee Institute, an HBCU school in Alabama, assembled choirs of as many as 100 voices. Dawson composed for them highly original arrangements that seemed to captured some of the spontaneous energy of the moment, as they might have sounded on a plantation, late at night.
Here is a 1950's recording of Dawson conducting the Tuskegee choir in his still popular arrangement of Ezekiel Saw de wheel - you can hear at the end a piling on of voice parts, recreating the frenzy of excitement and dancing that DuBois described.
While not explicitly referencing a promised land of freedom, Ezekiel's wheel signified the transformation of the suffering of the past into the freedom of tomorrow. That such confident and thrilling music could grow out of so such suffering and woe is truly astounding, and is simply unparalleled elsewhere in the history of the artistic creations of oppressed peoples. But it is not hard to imagine how this music must have served to bolster the courage of the men and women taking extreme risks of capture and worse by even planning their escape.
Another one of William Dawson's arrangements manages to capture both the high anticipation of deliverance found in the ring shout with the resigned determination of the sorrow songs. In Dawson's "Soon ah will be done wid de troubles of dis worl'" the choir alternates between highly energized but hushed phrases at the opening, as though waiting the signal to leave, with sudden outbursts of sorrow and a firm commitment to redeem the past suffering of love ones.
For some reason this arrangement was not included on the 1952 Dawson recording with his Tuskegee choir. So I thought I'd share an archival recording from a tour concert with my Chamber Singers of Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges. We always included Spirituals on our tour programs because if an American college choir doesn't sing the Spirituals, foreign audiences feel shortchanged! It was 2010 and we were in Turkey, sharing a concert with the Bogazici University choir in Instanbul. Since I only have an audio recording (and we are on Zoom!) made it into a video where students from three choirs could be seen together across time - the Fisk choir of the 1870s, the Tuskegee choir of the 1930's, and the Haverford/Bryn Mawr choir in 2010.
This has been a very brief overview of some of the historical context of the African-American spirituals. Our visit to Fisk was followed over the years by exchanges with HBCU choirs from Howard University and Lincoln University, closer to home. Questions of cultural appropriation, of whether it is right or wrong for people who are not themselves African-American to perform music that grew out of chattel slavery remain; these questions are complex and require continuing self-reflection with no easy conclusions. When any choir sings these songs, they are standing on 'sacred ground.' And if we sing these songs at all, it must be with our own voices, avoiding any hint of false imitation or mimicry.
In the end, one truth that keeps coming back to haunt me is that the denial by people European descent of the common humanity we share with people of African descent was what made the horrors of slavery possible. And as DuBois again writes:
“Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song – the rhythmic cry of the slave – stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.
To close with one poignant demonstration of that universality of the Spirituals is an example from an oratorio composed by the English composer Michael Tippett during the 2nd world war. Titled A Child of his Time, Tippett tried to make sense of the suffering of the Jewish people during Kristallnacht. He wanted something that would function like the familiar hymns (or "chorales") used by Bach in his settings of the passions, meant to be sung by the congregation in response to the action just observed. He chose to substitute African-American Spirituals instead of standard church hymns. Tippett recalled:
On one never-to-be-forgotten Sunday, I heard a singer on the radio sing the Negro spiritual “Steal Away”. At the phrase, “The trumpet sounds within-a my soul”, I was blessed with an immediate intuition: that I was being moved by this phrase in some way beyond what the musical phrase in itself warranted. I realized that in England or America everyone would be moved in this way, forcing me to see that the unique verbal and musical metaphor for this particular function in this particular oratorio had been found.
Here is Colin Davis with soloist John Shirley-Quirk and the BBC Symphony and Choral Society performing "Go Down Moses" from A Child of Our Time: