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The ever-growing success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers attracted widespread notice, and by 1873–1874 the troupe was facing a field of competitors, some of whom made innovations to the concert presentation of spirituals and others of whom were content to imitate the Fisk Jubilee Singers in style and repertory. Among the innovators were the Hampton Institute Singers, directed by Thomas P. Fenner. Their repertory was largely distinct from that of the Fisk singers, and they sang in a more folk-oriented performance style, as evidenced by the fact that they had a “shout leader” and sang in dialect. Another group of innovators was the Tennesseans (1874), directed by John Wesley Donavin, who sang in support of Central Tennessee College in Nashville. Their popularity rested on the supposed authenticity of what they billed as their “slave cabin concerts”—not a Fisk service of song but meant to be a naturalistic representation of slave life. The Tennesseans’ bass singer Leroy Pickett made many of their arrangements, becoming one of the earliest black arrangers of concert spirituals; later he became acting musical director. Imitators, on the other hand, reproduced the repertory and aesthetic of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. They included the Hyers sisters, who reoriented their programming of art songs to include spirituals so that they could complete with other black singers at the time, as well as the Shaw Jubilee Singers, New Orleans Jubilee Singers, Jackson Jubilee Singers, Old Original North Carolinians (managed by T. H. Brand), and Sheppard’s Colored Jubilee Singers. With all of these groups, a jubilee entertainment industry began to take shape in 1872 to 1874, as performance norms were established and as organizations like lyceum bureaus began to add jubilee troupes to their roster.

This chapter describes music instruction and spiritual singing at Industrial High School in Birmingham, and the groups that emerged from Alabama’s quartet training culture, which include: the Foster Singers; the Birmingham Jubilee Singers; the Blue Jay Singers; the Dunham Jubilee Singers; and the Kings of Harmony.

This chapter recounts the history of the founding of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1866 by the American Missionary Association and a trio of its agents: Erastus Milo (E. M.) Cravath, Edward Parmelee Smith, and John Ogden. The school’s educational philosophy emphasized teacher training, theology, training for craft work, and liberal arts. George L. White, hired as treasurer, initiated an informal music program that grew into an avenue for generating profit and promoting Fisk’s educational agenda, thanks to a choir he put together with the assistance of Ella Sheppard, who as music teacher was the first and only black staff member at Fisk from 1870 to 1875. In public, the Fisk choristers sang music from the white popular tradition, known as “people’s song” in the words of composer George Frederick Root. In private they introduced their spirituals to the white teachers, doing so under some duress, as they associated the songs with an enslaved past to be forgotten. Around early 1871 George White began urging the American Missionary Association to let him take his choristers on the road to raise money for the school; the group would be modeled on “singing families” such as the Hutchinson Family Singers. After much debate his plan was approved, and after a few weeks on the road White named his choir the Jubilee Singers. Although initially a dismal failure, the troupe’s rebranding, decision to sing more spirituals and less people’s song, and the patronage of Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn led to a reversal of fortune. By early 1872 the Jubilee Singers were on their way to fame and fortune. They presented their concerts as a “service of song,” to remind the public that their singing was not entertainment but rather had a religious and moral mission.

This chapter explores the process of musically and culturally translating oral folk spirituals into notated arranged spirituals performed on the concert stage. The American Missionary Association hired people’s song composer and church musician Theodore F. Seward to transcribe the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ spirituals as arranged for them by their director, George L. White. Using Seward’s transcriptions as well as those by Jubilee Singers Ella Sheppard and Thomas Rutling, plus reviews and primary sources, as well as early recordings, this chapter recreates as far as possible the performance practice of the concert spirituals sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers on their tours. The reception of the Fisk Jubilee Singers is surveyed through numerous reviews and is interpreted to show how a codified discourse about spirituals was created in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which stressed, for example, primitivism, wildness, nature, and the inherent musicality of the African race.

Stage productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) were a staple of theaters across the United States well into the twentieth century. In 1876, after jubilee troupes had become a national craze, George Howard and his wife Caroline added a jubilee troupe to their stage production, setting off a new trend. Soon jubilee singers were a prerequisite for every “Tom” production. This chapter examines the role of black singers in the show, using Howard’s revision of George Aiken’s script as well as reviews, and lists the spirituals used in the initial productions. A symbiosis between Tom shows and jubilee troupes developed, with jubilee troupes increasingly adding ethnographic portrayals of slave life to their concerts. Soon other plays that had a more tangential relation to plantation life (or none at all) began incorporating jubilee singers. Meantime, the Hyers sisters and Elizabeth Hopkins mounted musical plays that incorporated spirituals as well as cultivated music. Minstrel managers attempted a new level of “verisimilitude” in theatrical representations of slave life and music, constructing outdoor plantations and holding performances in slave cabins and cotton fields, as well as on nearby stages.

By the late 1870s the jubilee marketplace was in full swing, and the term jubilee singer had become so diluted as to be essentially meaningless. All manner of jubilee singers represented themselves as tradition bearers, giving rise to frequent skirmishes over legitimacy that were played out in marketing. As traditional spirituals, contrafacta, parodies, answer songs, and parodies of parodies cycled back on each other, the boundaries between them and their performers blurred. Some troupes, like the Wilmington Jubilee Singers, began as concert artists but ended up as minstrel or variety entertainers. Others, like the Nashville Students, successfully incorporated variety entertainment in their programs while maintaining their reputation as concert artists. The career of Sam Lucas demonstrates the nexus between folk and popular song traditions as the boundaries between the altruistic and the purely commercial, between the folk and the popular, and between “high” and “low” began to dissolve.

This chapter examines Chicago sacred music in a period of transition, focusing on the roles played by Charles Henry Pace and the Pace Jubilee Singers. The Pace Jubilee Singers are a fascinating example of African American sacred music in transition. They were among Chicago's first black religious artists to perform on radio, broadcasting during the 1920s and early 1930s over radio station WCBN and megawatt stations WLS and WGN. The group was also among the first mixed jubilee ensembles to feature a female soloist prominently in the person of Hattie Parker. This chapter first provides a historical background on Pace and his formation of the Pace Jubilee Singers before discussing the group's recordings, including sessions with Victor Records, and Parker's contribution to the group. It also considers the Pace Jubilee Singers' radio appearances following the end of their recording career, as well as the careers of Parker and Pace after the group's disbandment. Pace continued writing and publishing sacred music, including gospel songs, in Pittsburgh. He died on December 16, 1963.

The earliest literary recognitions of black music set up an artificial dichotomy between “white” and “black” traditions, suggesting for each of these two categories an essence and a stability that didn’t exist. Concert spirituals, commercial spirituals, and indeed the entire black entertainment industry of the nineteenth century were shaped by a common dynamic. Music, dance, comedy, performance practice, and other expressive strategies that had emerged among black Americans—and that were closely bound up with their social and religious lives—were made to conform to the preferences and expectations of white audiences. This conclusion looks at why the spiritual became the common denominator among the different genres in this new entertainment industry, as well as the shift to black managers, arrangers, impresarios, and the role of women entertainers at this time.

As jubilee troupes multiplied and grew in popularity, minstrels and variety performers began to burlesque their performances by using songs modeled on spirituals, which I call commercial spirituals. These came in three broad categories: parodies of specific spirituals (including contrafacta), popular songs modeled on the musical style and content of spirituals, and popular songs whose lyrics (but not their musical style) alluded to spirituals. Bryant’s Minstrels was an early blackface troupe that parodied the spiritual “Gospel Train,” under the title “Get Aboard Little Children.” Other minstrel and variety performers parodied specific troupes of jubilee singers; they became known generically as the “Hamtown Students” or a variation on that name. This chapter examines specific song parodies by burlesque jubilee troupes, informed by newspaper reviews and the Ham-Town Students Songster, which contains words and music. Performances by both white minstrel performers and black performers are considered, with particular attention to the Georgia Minstrels.

This chapter explores the movement of African Americans into the genre of blackface minstrelsy in the post-Civil War era. It argues, rooted in hatred and love, the minstrelsy-based perception of black people both limited and created opportunities for African Americans in an era of terror-based white supremacy and Jim Crow segregation.

This chapter focuses on Harry T. Burleigh's music experience and training in Erie. Burleigh demonstrated his love for music and his gifts as a singer long before he left Erie to study at the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. Music education at home and in studios opened doors for Burleigh to a variety of performance venues that prepared him for his successful audition at the National Conservatory and the rigorous course of study he would pursue there. Along the way he earned the support of many of Erie's prominent citizens, who would contribute to a fund supporting the early months of his training in New York City. This chapter examines when and where Burleigh heard and sang spirituals and what exposure he had to black musicians who toured the country, including the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the Hampton Juiblee Singers, James Monroe Trotter, and the Hyers Sisters.

This chapter focuses on the rise of Chicago's gospel quartets, hailed as the “rock stars of religious music” by music historian Al Young, after World War II. The postwar migration to Chicago coincided with the rise to national prominence of the male gospel quartet. Quartets such as the Soul Stirrers, the Pilgrim Travelers, and the Harmonizing Four were packing auditoriums with exciting live performances, singing on hundreds of radio stations, and sellling records by the tens of thousands. This chapter first takes a look at the gospel music of the Soul Stirrers before turning to churches and venues featuring local and traveling quartets. It then considers other quartets and gospel singers, including Sam Cooke and Paul Foster, R. H. Harris and the Christland Singers, the Highway QCs, Johnnie Taylor, James Phelps and the Clefs of Calvary, and Roscoe Robinson. It also discusses three quartets that formed in the South, migrated to Chicago, and became nationally recognized artists: the Pilgrim Jubilee Singers, the Kelly Brothers, and the Norfleet Brothers.

This chapter analyses a distinction within theological studies between xenolalia and glossolalia. The distinction is important to consider because one—xenolalia—operates through settler colonial logics, discarding the noise of the Other. Written in the service of privileging glossolalia, the chapter explicates how the university—a space of pedagogy—needs to radically reorient itself in terms of relations to objects of knowledge.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the main themes covered in the present book. In the early twentieth century there were countless initiatives, at both national and local levels, to provide black vocal music training. The aim was to disseminate knowledge of vocal music and four-part harmony singing among the African American masses, in order to raise the standard of musical culture. The impetus for music training can be attributed to the surprising commercial success of Original Fisk University Jubilee Singers.

This chapter examines Negro music as well as musicians such as singers, instrumentalists, directors, and composers in Illinois in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It begins with a discussion of various Negro musicians in Illinois, from piano prodigy “Blind Tom” Wiggins and the Hampton Singers to the Fisk Jubilee Singers and choral groups known for singing spirituals. Among them were the Chicago Choral Study Club, one of the first to perform the works of black composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. The chapter also considers the emergence of organized music schools among Chicago Negroes, including the Coleridge-Taylor Music School and the National Conservatory of Music, as well as church choirs, musical clubs and associations.