Fisk Jubilee Singers Vocal Concert

“Their singing of the strange, weird religious melodies of the South is something unique, and is sure to give satisfaction.”  

“The company of young colored people from Fisk University gave their final concert here on Friday evening. They have been travelling through the country, and if they have filled other halls as they did Steinway’s on this occasion, they certainly will have no reason to complain of any lack of public appreciation. The large hall so overflowed that the great doors leading into the smaller one were thrown open to find seats for the throng.

We took occasion to say, speaking of a recent amateur concert given at this same hall, last week, by other colored people, that in undertaking Italian scenas and arias and concerted pieces, they were quite out of their element, and on the wrong road.

The earnest attention and hearty enthusiasm with which their audiences listen to the much less ambitious attempts of the Jubilee Singers confirm this opinion. These young people sing the old camp-meeting, Methodist, and plantation songs of the Southern States. This singing itself is rude; the songs are, from an art standard almost barbarous, the words deal with holy things with a freedom that borders on irreverence, if not blasphemy, and yet, because the melody and the words come from the heart, and because they are genuine, unaffected, simple, homely and direct, they take people captive. It is the rude, unwritten music of an untutored race, born of that nervous frenzy miscalled religious ecstasy, and giving expression to a low order of devotional and musical feeling. We do not find the melody very much superior to the poetry. Both rise from the same source and attain about the same art elevation. Here is a specimen of the latter:

Gwine to write to Massa Jesus

To send some valiant soldier

To turn back Pharaoh’s army, Hallelu!

In another song we find the following:

When Israel was in Egypt’s land,

Let my people go,

Oppressed so hard they could not stand,

Let my people go,

Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land

Tell old Pharaoh let my people go.

O brethren, you’d better be engaged, 

Let my people go,

For the devil is out on a big rampage,

Let my people go &c.

It would not seem as though there could be much in this sort of thing to entertain, and yet there is, and some women in the audience were even so affected by the rude harmonies as to weep.

Several addresses were delivered in the course of the evening [four brief paragraphs follow on this topic]. 

The Jubilee Singers are quite young, some of the girls being apparently not more than fourteen. All or most of them were formerly slaves. The voices of the women are better than those of the men, the latter being quite unmusical.

But it is certainly very clear that the colored people have a musical future before them, of which we now only see the germs.”