Fisk Jubilee Singers Concert

“The ‘Jubilee Singers,’ of whom the readers of the Tribune have often heard during the past year and a half, gave a concert last night in Steinway Hall, before an audience which entirely filled the building. These young people are connected with the Fisk University, a college in Nashville intended especially for the training of colored teachers. In 1871 they set out on a concert tour to raise money for the enlargement of their institution, and in the course of the season they made $20,000. This year they propose doubling the fund, if possible, and so far as we may judge from the result of their efforts last night, we risk little in predicting for them a flattering success. There are eleven persons in the company—seven young women and four young men. Most of them were originally slaves; all were born in the midst of bondage, and their early lives illustrate some of the most terrible characteristics of American Slavery. The songs which they brought us last night were almost without exception the songs which they brought with them out of servitude,--the rapturous hymn in which the oppressed used to chant the coming of the day of deliverance, the sad strains in which the suffering slave bemoaned his wrongs, the shouts of religious exaltation which resounded in the plantation camp-meeting. If the selections given on this occasion fairly represent the favorite subjects of the slave singers, the prevalence of a prophetic spirit among them, long before the dawn of freedom, is a very significant circumstance. The constant references last night to liberation, in one form or another, must have struck every attentive listener. The mind of the verse maker seems to have been constantly upon the deliverance of Egypt out of bondage, and the singer was perpetually rejoicing in the [illegible] of ‘Old Pharaoh.’   One of the most striking of the melodies begins with a vigorous solo:

‘Gwine to write to Massa Jesus,

To send some valiant soldier,’

and then breaks, with accelerated time, into a chorus:

‘To turn back Pharaoh’s army, Halelujah 

To turn back Pharaoh’s army, Halelujah!’

The famous hymn, ‘Go down, Moses,’ of whose twenty-five stanzas the Jubilee Singers gave us a few specimens last night, begins:

‘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 land,

Tell old Pharaoh, Let my people go.’

Another draws consolation and encouragement from the story of Daniel, and the most effective and dramatic of all the selections, last night, was this, sung in unison with extraordinary expression and vigor:

‘Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel,

D’liver Daniel, d’liver Daniel,

Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel,

And why not every man?   

He delivered Daniel from the lion’s den,

Jonah from the belly of the whale,

And the Hebrew children from the fiery furnace;

And why not every man?’

Grotesque as this seems in print, not only in the words, but in many of the musical phrases, there is nothing grotesque, there is even a grandeur and nobility in the song when one hears it from the lips of these children, who have in truth been delivered from a bondage that was worse than death. So of some of the hymns of religious sentiment; there were lines in them that provoked a laugh—

‘When I was a mourner just like you,

Washed in the blood of the Lamb,

I prayed and prayed till I got through,

Washed in the blood of the Lamb.’

--or,

‘King Jesus rides on a milk white horse,

No man can a-hinder me.’

--or,

‘Gwine to ride up in de chariot,

Sooner in de morning!

Gwine to chatter wid de angels,

Sooner in de morning!’

--but no one could fail to be impressed by the devout spirit which breathed through the [veriest?] nonsense. There never was singing more intensely dramatic than this, for there never was singing more sincere. It was not an exhibition of art; it was the expression of real emotion.

What there is in the music itself that seizes so firmly upon the imagination it would be difficult to explain. The slave songs are the spontaneous outgrown of uncultivated sentiment, yet they follow strict scientific laws of which their makers must have been absolutely ignorant. The most eccentric of them can be reduced to regular musical form, and the rhythm, though a good deal is apparently left to the taste and temper of the singer, is always clearly marked. Nor are the ladies always very simple. They not only have their peculiar turns, unlike anything else in the whole range of musical inventions, but they abound sometimes, in difficult intervals—as the hymn, ‘Roll, Jordan, roll,’ which even a cultivated singer might have trouble in catching. The execution last night was invariably true and spirited, and in many cases almost perfect. Most of the pieces were sung by the whole band in harmony, and these were by far the best. Their pianissimo effects were admirable; the changes of sentiment were beautifully marked; and the precision with which the young persons kept together deserved the heartiest praise. They have sweet and rich voices, rather pathetic in character, and one or two of them who sang solos betrayed the possession of gifts well worth cultivation. One of their number, Miss Ella Sheppard, accompanied the solos on the piano and did it very well. The solos were unaccompanied.”