The Fisk Jubilee Singers

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

The Jubilee Singers photographed by James Wallace Black, about 1872. James Wallace Black; American Missionary Association. Library of Congress.

Nine students went on the road in 1871 to keep their school from closing. They came back having built it a building. Fisk opened on the ninth of January 1866 in a set of abandoned army barracks in Nashville, run by the American Missionary Association and named for a Freedmen's Bureau general. By the autumn of 1871 it was deep in debt. George L. White, the treasurer — a blacksmith's son from Cadiz, New York, whose actual passion was music — proposed taking the students out to sing for the money. They left Nashville on the sixth of October 1871 with what was left in the treasury. There were nine of them and all but two had been born into slavery. Minnie Tate was fourteen. Isaac Dickerson had been a Confederate colonel's valet. Jennie Jackson was the granddaughter of Andrew Jackson's body servant. Ella Sheppard, who played the piano and coached the voices and eventually conducted, had been bought out of slavery by her own father for three hundred and fifty dollars, after he had bought himself for eighteen hundred. The first concert in Cincinnati took less than fifty dollars. What turned it was the decision to sing the spirituals — music that had been sung in fields and behind closed doors and almost never in front of a paying white audience. At Oberlin, in front of a convention of ministers, the room went silent and then people began to weep. White renamed the group after a night of prayer, from Leviticus: the year of jubilee, when the slaves go free. In March 1872 they sang for President Grant at the White House. That same trip they were put out of a Washington hotel because of their race. They went to Britain the next year and sang for Queen Victoria, who wrote in her journal that night that they were real Negroes, come from America, and had been slaves. In Holland they raised ten thousand dollars. The money built Jubilee Hall, finished in 1876 — the first permanent building in the South put up for the education of Black students, with walls better than a foot thick, in a decade when schools like it were being burned. How much they raised is not settled: accounts range from about fifty thousand dollars for a single tour to more than a hundred and sixty thousand across all of them. One story you will hear should be set aside. Queen Victoria is often said to have called Nashville a musical city, giving it the name Music City. No Fisk source records it. Nashville's nickname traces to a radio announcer in 1950. The original group broke up in Germany in July 1878, worn out, after the missionary association cut off its funding. A new one went out in 1879. Ella Sheppard rebuilt it again in 1890. Fisk students are still singing under that name. They received the National Medal of Arts in 2008 and a Grammy in 2021. If you sang with the Jubilee Singers, or someone in your family did, add it below. Compiled by MyHistoryStone from published reference sources, August 2026. Corrections welcome.