Andrea Williams

Nine young people, most of them born as property, sang a university out of bankruptcy and gave the world the music. A university for freed slaves was about to close. It had no money and the roof was failing. So its treasurer took nine students on the road to sing, with the last of the school's cash in his pocket. Most of them had been born into slavery. They sang the songs from the plantations, which no white audience had ever heard sung properly. Fisk University opened in Nashville in 1866 for formerly enslaved people. By 1871 it was broke. George White took nine singers out with no guarantee of anything. The first months were a disaster — they were refused hotels, played to small halls, and nearly gave up. Then they started singing the spirituals rather than the parlour songs, and it changed. They sang in Washington. They toured Britain and sang for Queen Victoria, who is reported to have said they sang like a people from a city of music. They raised, over several tours, something in the order of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars — enough to build Jubilee Hall, which still stands and is a national landmark, and to save the university. And they did something larger by accident. Before those tours, the spirituals were songs white America had only ever heard mocked in minstrel shows. The Jubilee Singers put them in concert halls and they were understood for what they are.