Fisk Jubilee Singers: A Balm in Gilead
Still Needed. Still Needed.
Sixteen attractive, talented, committed young people stride proudly onstage in October 2022 to carry on a tradition begun in 1871. They represent Fisk, the very first American university open to “young men and women irrespective of color.”
At that time, when the university was only five years old, Fisk treasurer and music director, a white professor at a black school, ironically named George Leonard White, formed the original eight-member choir to tour, earning money to keep the fledgling university afloat. Consisting of newly freed slaves or their relatives, the choir traveled with pianist Ella Sheppard and pastor, Henry Bennett.
It was only midway through their maiden tour that they found their joyful name. In an act of true charity, they had donated their meager proceeds to victims of the Great Chicago Fire, so they had no money to keep traveling and the dangers of travel for freed slaves was no small matter. Should they keep going or go on home? As we say in the South, they “prayed on it.”
Rather than wallow in discouragement, they regrouped, naming themselves “Jubilee Singers” after the Jewish Year of Jubilee, celebrating their recent liberation from bondage. And on this Sunday afternoon 150 years later, I am in the audience they are liberating from the cares of the world through singing joyfully of a time when cares were paramount, when oppressive societal rules meant they had to hide their pain of the here and now, aim their happiness to the hereafter. That “hereafter” was what W.E.B. DuBois, himself a Fisk alum, called “double-consciousness,” a double metaphor that white people were meant to hear as heaven, but more often than not, black people were meant to hear as escape to the North, or heaven, or both, whichever came first.
We live in roiling tumultuous times. As hatred and violence grow, as we question the fellowship of our fellow citizens, we sometimes need respite, some way of seeing signs of goodness and hope around us, some way to commune with one another in peace and harmony. Dressed in neatly tailored black and white, these fine musicians let the music tell the story of Jubilee Singers through the ages, never turning back, keeping the vow they made when they first took their name, singing:
Done made my vow to the Lord, and I never will turn back.
I will go, I shall go, to see what the end will be.
Though much of the music is uplifting, songs like “An’ I Cry” (arr. Noah Ryder) with its poignant lyrics
Sometimes I feel like my Savior died in vain,
An’ I cry.
Sometimes I feel like I lost my soul again,
An’ I cry,
reminds me of periods of hopelessness, then and now. This solemn mood inflects my take on the jaunty number that follows.
As they sing “I’m A-rolling Along in an Unfriendly World” (arr. Thomas Rutling) with such crisp enunciation and such innocent determination, I can’t help but look at the beautiful skin tones ranging from creamy bisque to deepest mahogany, the hair styles ranging from short afros through lightly processed curls and weaves, to waist-length braids. Each of these musicians, even then in 2022, could be stopped and harassed or worse, just as their predecessors were, just because…
I sit there remembering Jordan Davis, the black teenager, shot and killed in 2012 because a white man thought his music was too loud. Initially, that man was convicted of “attempting” to kill the other teens in the SUV, not of actually killing Jordan. Lord help us.
I sit there remembering Isley Brothers lyrics from 1975:
I try to play my music, they say my music too loud
I try talking about it, I get the big runaround
And when I roll with the punches, I get knocked on the ground
By all this bullshit going down.
And that makes me bristle, seethe, fume. That, and what I recognized as the mini-Motown moves. This uptempo song had the audience swaying in their seats but the choir barely moved.
This sad situation preserved a less uplifting part of Jubilee Singer tradition, a tradition later continued by Motown performers like the Supremes. Because our black bodies were historically denigrated by comparisons to animals, oversexed beasts, we had to prove our humanity by denying our humanity. Singers in both Gospel and Motown were taught we needed to restrict our movements to the music, restrain the joy our bodies felt in the music, reject our African traditions of the music in order to make our oppressors feel better.
I was doing it too, as a writer. I was restricting, restraining, rejecting my movement, my joy, my instincts. Why?
I wanted to write about the Jubilee Singers, their history, the continuing hate, the Jordan Davis murder, the required rejection of our treasured traditions all in service of white comfort, so I contacted a local paper for whom I do occasional pieces on the performing and visual arts. I mentioned my intent to go a bit more political in the piece, making it a literary fusion of review, current events, and personal narrative. “Fine, as long as you are responsible.”
“Responsible.”
As if I were a teenager for whom responsible behavior was not a given, as opposed to the mature woman and trained scholar that I am. That made me bristle, seethe, fume.
In November 2022, a powerful Tweet thread appeared. It addressed the disrespect “liberal” MSNBC had shown to African American weekend host Tiffany Cross when they abruptly, publicly, decided to non-renew her contract. Elie Mystal, Harvard Law School grad, writer for The Nation, author of the New York Times bestseller Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution, and all around good-trouble gadfly, said:
Telling the truth about white people to white people can exact a terrible price on one’s career and opportunities…Every professional and activist black person I know is out here playing a game of *risk management.* How much *can* I say around these white folks, before these white folks come for me. And what punishments am I willing to accept in order to say it…
I might engage in more risk-loving behavior than the average bear, but there are absolutely things, true things, I don’t say or write because the white punishment I will face is too damn high.
I have written a wider variety of pieces than anyone else the paper publishes. When contacting major arts groups, I’m consistently praised as “one of our best journalists.” Like an away team leader on the Starship Enterprise, I’m consistently sent where no writer for the site has gone before. Traditional symphony? Send me. Classical ballet? Send me. Hard Bop Jazz? Send me. Modern Cuban dance? Send me. Australian cabaret acts? Send me.
But that “responsible” hit me where it would have really hurt had I not built up a decades-old emotional callus, had I not been practicing risk management all my adult life. As it was, I felt only a mild throbbing, a throbbing that only increased when I realized I hadn’t trusted them. I hadn’t thought the site was ready for the truth. That’s why I had given a heads up, why I was censoring myself. And the response verified my lack of trust. I sent a “PG version” where my words, like the Supremes’ hips, barely moved. Jesus wept.
I took the real version, the polished, but unvarnished truth version to my Friday night writing group, a multi-generational group of African American poets, novelists, essayists. They understood. They understood holding ourselves back, like the bodies of the young musicians on the stage.
We understand, yet still we sing. Like the Jubilee Singers, we harmonize, we blend, we take solos, we back each other up. We try to give something warm and loving to a world that rarely repays us in kind. We sing.
We sing because we must. Perpetual fear and anger and parsing our every word or finger pop or hip sway — all of that is soul destroying, so I sink back into the music.
In the gorgeous Roland Carter arrangement of “In Bright Mansions,” the acme of a stellar program, I find a balm in the Gilead that is my red state home. As the choir holds an extended chord that seems like time seeping into eternity, seamlessly taking breaths, the lower voices repeatedly, deeply, gently intone the voice of God’s son in John 14:2
In my Father’s house, there are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you.
And with the generosity the Fisk Jubilee Singers have shown since the group’s inception, taking their arrangements across the country, around the world, and back home again, they provide the same respite from the troubles of the world now as they did all those generations ago, over a century ago. Back then, they saved the bricks and mortar of Fisk University with music of the spirit. Now, they soothe the spirit of the world. And although I feel a bit disconsolate that such respite is still needed, it is nonetheless wonderful, truly wonderful, that they are still here to provide it.
