Fisk Jubilee Singers - They Didn’t Want to Sing Spirituals, but They Did — and Changed American Music
The Fisk Jubilee Singers will celebrate the group’s 150th anniversary this week.
Photo Credit...William DeShazer for The New York Times
NASHVILLE — In an account of her years as assistant director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Ella Sheppard, a gifted musician who had been enslaved as a child, recalled one of the student ensemble’s earliest excursions outside Nashville, only a handful of years after the Civil War. The singers were all students at Fisk University, a school for emancipated former slaves. They were stranded at a rural train station with Ms. Sheppard and their director, a white abolitionist named George White, when an angry mob arrived. In the face of the white men’s fury, the students began to sing.