Sang before a huge audience that included ambassadors, justices of the Supreme Court, clergymen, members of the cabinet and the vice president, and the next day they gave a private concert for President Ulysses S. Though they sing like nightingales, they need more to eat than nightingales do.'' The group caught on and soon had engagements in all the major Northern cities.
But Henry Ward Beecher, the most popular preacher in the United States, featured them at his Plymouth Church in Brooklyn and urged members of his congregation to give them money: ''FolksĬan't live on air. Initially audiences did not know how to respond to the deeply religious When the Jubilee Singers began their work, most Americans thought of black music in terms of blackfaced minstrel troupes, with their racist jokes about the antics of a primitive people. Support of their university, to thousands in the North and in Europe. Tells how the little troupe of less than a dozen young black singers, accompanied by their amateur choirmaster, George Leonard White, braved racism, indifference and hostility to bring their songs, and their pleas for Based on careful research in the Fisk University archives and in the papers of the American Missionary Association, which sponsored the college, the book ''Dark Midnight When I Rise'' details the history of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Group that raised more than $150,000 - more than $2.5 million in today's dollars - and kept the university afloat. The best example of the magic that saved Fisk was the transformation of an untrained student chorus into a magnificent singing That alchemy was characteristic of the early days of the struggling university, which was always on the verge of bankruptcy. Thus, Andrew Ward writes, they transformed ''the instruments of their enslavement into the agencies of their liberation.'' They sold these rusted relics of their bondage as scrap iron and used the proceeds On the school's grounds, heaps of chains and manacles from Porter's Slave Yard, which had occupied the site before the Civil War. N the late 1860's, students in Nashville enrolled in the struggling school for former slaves that would become Fisk University discovered, buried
The Story of the Jubilee Singers Who Introduced the World to the Music of Black America. First Chapter: 'Dark Midnight When I Rise'.The story of Fisk's Jubilee Singers, who popularized spirituals.
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