HUM 223: Fisk Jubilee Singers and spirituals

One of the great American stories tells of a group of black college students from Nashville, Tenn., who in the 1870s took a musical tradition with its origins in plantation life, transformed it into a form of sophisticated art music and in the 1890s attracted the attention of one of the foremost European composers of the time.

They were the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and the musical tradition was the black spiritual, or "Negro spiritual" in the language of the day.

Starting in the 1870s, African American arrangers and composers took folk melodies and rewrote them as popular audience using the same kind of harmonies and dynamics as European classical or art music, and they brought the spirituals to the same level of musical sophistication as the lieder (songs) of Schubert or Brahms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Others took up the music. One was Anton Dvorak, the Czech composer, used the spirituals as thematic material for his New World Symphony (Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, 1893). Another, whose work we will hear a little of, was the British composer Sir Michael Tippett. Dvorak was especially important, since he was a famous European composer and thus brought a feeling of legitimacy to Americans who had a kind of inferiority complex about their own art and music.

(Do you ever wonder why I put things in red sometimes on the blog? Do you think they might turn up on the midterm exam? Just askin'.)

In the beginning, African American spirituals grew out of "ring shouts" and ceremonies that were essentially religious, involving both singing and dance. Their history is sketched in briefly at the Spirituals Project website, a project of the University of Denver. More background, including sound files, is available from the Spiritual Workshop of Paris, France. (Be sure to listen to "Heaven” by JoAnne Stephenson, accompanied by Lorna Young-Wright, to hear some pretty fine left- and right-hand syncopation in a classical piano style.) All the sound files on the Paris website show how African American music was adapted to the styles of art music, but Young-Wright's playing has a "swing" to it you just don't get in a Schubert art song.

Central to the flowering of the black spirituals were the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who took their polished arrangments on the road during the 1870s to raise money for their school, Fisk University. They suffered poverty, ill health and initially hostile audiences, but they sang before Queen Victoria and they won over the musical intelligensia of their day. They are still around, and their website tells their story. A slightly more detailed history is available on the Primarily A Cappella Singers.com website. It is as dramatic as a romance novel, but the story is true.

W.E.B. DuBois, who studied at Fisk in the 1880s, was especially stirred by the spirituals. "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," he said. DuBois called them the "sorrow songs," and in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he said of them:

... 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.

In the 1890s, Dvorak taught at a conservatory of music in New York City, and there he learned of the spirituals from Harry Burleigh, a student of his, whom he asked to sing them repeatedly. Burleigh went on to arrange "Deep River," which may have served as a theme for Dvorak's New World Symphony, and compose his own art songs. He wrote in 1917 of the values in his artistic arrangments of the spirituals:

Success in singing these Folk Songs is primarily dependent upon deep spiritual feeling. The voice is not nearly so important as the spirit; and then rhythm, for the Negro's soul is linked with rhythm, and is an essential characteristic of most all Folk Songs.

It is a serious misconception of their meaning and value to treat them as "minstrel" songs, or to try to make them funny by a too literal attempt to imitate the manner of the Negro in singing them, by swaying the body, clapping the hands, or striving to make the peculiar inflections of voice that are natural with the colored people. Their worth is weakened unless they are done impressively, for through all these songs there breathes a hope, a faith in the ultimate justice and brotherhood of man. The cadences of sorrow invariably turn to joy, and the message is ever manifest that eventually deliverance from all that hinders and oppresses the soul will come and man - every man - will be free.

I haven't been able to find Dvorak's article on American music online, but a University of Texas feature story on the New World Symphony quotes from it:

[Dvorak] reveled ... in African American music, such as spirituals like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the likes of which he had never heard before. In fact, Dvorak recognized in black music the future music of America, and his prediction was borne out in the ragtime, blues and jazz that would be so central to the music of the 20th century.

“In the [N]egro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music,” he wrote. “They are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay, or what you will…. There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source.”

Most of the influence of black American music has been in blues, jazz and rock. But I think it's important to remember some of it was sung before the crowned heads of Europe and flourished at the highest artistic levels, too.

Compare Sir Michael Tippett's arrangements in the 1941 opera "A Child of Our Time" of "Go Down Moses" as performed at England's Royal Festival Hall; and "Deep River" conducted by Somtow Sucharitkul with the Orpheus Choir of Bangkok and the Siam Philharmonic. Tippet's opera was about the persecution of German Jews leading up to the Holocaust, and he was attracted to black American spirituals because they "came out of another time of great oppression with slavery during the 19th century and before."