[This past weekend, I dropped off a piece of my heart in Nashville. So instead of my annual Charlottesville series, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Nashville contexts, leading up to a post on the city in 2024!]
On two of the
many vital legacies of a cultural and historical artistic project.
While the kinds
of post-slavery and –war debates and questions I discussed in
this post were central threads to the Reconstruction era, the period was
also intensely focused on the future, and more exactly on how
to help African Americans become a full part of this new American community
within that future (or, for far too many Reconstruction actors, how to stop them from doing so).
Chief among the progressive responses to that question was an emphasis on education, one
that took place in every community and at every level but that included the
founding of a number of new African
American colleges and universities. One of the earliest such post-war
institutions was Fisk University,
founded in Memphis as the Fisk Free Colored School just six months after the
war’s end by members of the American Missionary Association. By 1871, thanks to
the vicissitudes of Reconstruction among other factors, Fisk was struggling to
stay afloat financially, and its treasurer and music director, George White,
decided to found a choral group that could tour to raise funds and awareness
for the university’s community and efforts.
That group
embarked on its first national (and eventually international) tour on October 6th,
1871, the beginning of a more than 18-month period of performances. Early in
the tour—faced
with one of their many encounters with racism and hostility, this time in
Columbus, Ohio—White and the performers decided to name themselves the Jubilee
Singers, a tribute to the
spiritual and cultural vision of a “year of jubilee” after emancipation. By
the end of the tour, the Jubilee Singers had more than lived up to that name,
achieving a series of stunning triumphs that included performances at the Boston World’s Peace
Jubilee and International Music Festival, at the White
House for President Ulysses Grant, and (when the tour was extended to an
overseas leg in 1873) for England’s
Queen Victoria. In an era when nearly all of the representations of African
Americans onstage were performed by whites in blackface—whether in overtly racist
minstrel shows or in slightly more nuanced productions such as Tom Shows—it’s
difficult to overstate the importance of this group of talented African
American performers taking and commanding the stage, offering an alternative to
those constructed representations and giving voice to their own identities,
stories and histories, and communities in the process. That’s one legacy of the
Fisk Jubilee Singers, and it continues
to this day.
The Fisk Jubilee
Singers also connected, overtly, immediately, and importantly, to the
aforementioned questions of historical memory, however. They did so first and
foremost through their choice of repertoire, which in its initial iteration
focused almost entirely on African American slave spirituals (what W.E.B. Du
Bois would later call, in his beautiful, multi-part engagement with the genre
in The Souls of Black Folk, “sorrow
songs”). I believe it’s not at all inaccurate to say that by arranging and
performing their versions of these songs, the Jubilee Singers helped keep them
alive, indeed helped turn them into a foundational and ongoing genre
of American music that could endure into future generations and would influence
every subsequent such genre. In so doing, I would argue that they provided
one middle ground answer to the post-Reconstruction debate between Alexander Crummell
and Frederick Douglass I highlighted
here—a way to carry forward communal memories and voices of slavery without
dwelling in the most horrific and traumatic elements, to build on that
historical legacy but at the same time to take potent and inspiring ownership
of it for new purposes and goals. That’s a model of the best of Reconstruction,
and precisely the kind of story and history we need to remember if we’re to
move beyond the most limited and mythologized collective memories of the
period.
Next
Nashville context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Nashville connections you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment