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The Jubilee Singers

© Kelly Scheufler

Queen Victoria sat quietly in a chair on a platform, dressed in black, her head adorned with a widow’s cap. She watched the seven women and four men in front of her sing. It was unlike any performance she had ever seen before, moody, earthy, and deeply moving. After a pause in the performance, the queen spoke. “Tell them we are delighted with their songs, and that we wish them to sing ‘John Brown.’” The singers obliged, and after the concert was done, the Queen smiled as she retreated.

This concert was staged in England in 1873. The performers were called The Jubilee Singers and they were poor, penniless blacks. They had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and were making their way through the Reconstruction. While the rest of The United States tried to pull itself back together, these former slaves were trying to make a life for themselves as free citizens.

Ella Sheppard directed the Jubilee Singers. When Ella was a young girl, her mother almost drowned her, in an effort to save her from a life of misery as a slave. She changed her mind, and Ella’s father purchased Ella out of bondage from her owners. He fled with Ella to Ohio where she learned to read, write and play the piano. At the end of the Civil War, Ella was determined to become a teacher and she enrolled at a school for freed blacks in Nashville called Fisk University.

Under slavery, reading and writing was forbidden. When slavery ended, many former slaves flocked to schools for freedmen. They were determined to get an education, something that had separated them from their owners, something they needed to count their wages, something they needed to vote and gain power over their lives.

Fisk University started out in an abandoned army hospital barracks. The American Missionary Association ran the school. Fisk’s treasurer was a man named George White. His job was to keep the school afloat. George White also had a passion for music, and after hearing the haunting voices of the former slaves, he assembled a choir. The choir rehearsed popular songs of the day. But White was enthralled by the music he heard behind closed doors. They were the songs from the fields, the melodies the slaves used to help them get through days of grueling work. The slaves were not readers, so these songs didn’t have many words. They were songs that everyone could sing over and over. “Swing low sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.”

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