Instantly the fiddler grins and goes at it tooth and nail; there is new energy in the tambourine; new laughter in the dancers.
— Charles Dickens, American Notes.
A stout, ruddy-faced lady, simply dressed in black.
— Ella Sheppard of the Fisk Jubilee Singers on Queen Victoria.
In 1837, when Bridgetower was fifty-nine years old, and entering the twilight of his career, William IV died and Victoria of Kent became queen. In the British psyche, the daughter of the Princess of Saxe-Coburg has a place of monumental importance, as much for the longevity of her reign as for the social and environmental transformations that we are still witness to.
The age of steam brought irreversible modernity; 5,000 miles of railway had been laid in Britain by the end of 1848. At the queen’s coronation, the “horse bus” was a common sight. By the time of her death in 1901, the honk of the motorcar could be heard. The falling cost of private transport in the decades following Victoria’s death was a revolution as far reaching as that in public transport during her reign.
The iconic images of the Victorian era evoke hardship and suffering, as well as progress and possibility in commerce, society and politics. Imagine sewer-hunters, tourists to the Lakes, rows of bony, ragged beings in the workhouse, countless hoops on a lady’s lace petticoat sewn by Thomas Hood’s seamstress “with fingers weary and worn/ with eyelids heavy and red”, pallid chimney sweeps with soot-stained cheeks, white entertainers smeared in burnt cork, queues at standpipes, match-factory girls, crinoline-clad duchesses enjoying croquet, rural labourers in loose smocks and tight neckerchiefs, gentlemen with whiskers and top hats, the rise of cricket as a national sport, the village parson issuing sound advice, a baby being put to sleep with a drop of laudanum at the Blackamoor Inn, slender moving fingers at the first typing pool, blocks of “planned housing” and “model dwellings” funded by wealthy philanthropists such as the American merchant George Peabody.
Such images underline one defining characteristic of Victorian England – the growth of towns and cities to accommodate the population that was drawn out of the countryside following the enclosure of the common land to work in the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire and the factories of Birmingham, Sheffield and the East End of London, and the ribbon development of suburban housing for a growing middle class when the railways made daily commuting possible.
The rapid industrial growth of Britain in the early nineteenth century (from capital accumulation built on the profits of the slave trade) and its accompanying ideology of Free Trade were amongst the factors that eventually tilted the balance against the old landed lobby (still powerful in Parliament) with vested interests in the slave trade and slave-grown sugar.1
The crusade against slavery led eventually to the Slave Trade Act 18072 and then to the Abolition of Slavery in 1833, but the situation of blacks in the Caribbean did not change for the better. Abolition left power in the hands of the old slave owners and they ensured that freed African-Caribbeans had little access to land. In Trinidad, British Guiana and elsewhere the sugar planters imported labour from India and China to reduce the bargaining power of black workers. Parallel to this, cane sugar declined in importance as European-grown beet sugar took over. Even before that time, the Caribbean, once the source of imperial grandeur, was becoming a neglected backwater as the centre of empire moved to India, with Africa in the rear. From the 1840s onward, all parts of the British West Indies had large labour surpluses and high un- and underemployment that could only be addressed through emigration. People chased work from island to island, and some found a brutal economic salvation in the labour demanded by the building of the Panama canal. These were the conditions that lay behind the story of migration to Britain that follows in later chapters. What added insult to injury was the fact that slave owners c. 1840 were compensated with £20m (worth £16.5 billion in current values) for their loss of their human property. The ex-enslaved are still awaiting reparations.
By 1820 Britain ruled over 26% of the world population and controlled one third of international trade by controlling an efficient network of sea routes to India, Africa, Australasia and the Caribbean. But imperial outposts had costs. Overseas territories brought profit to some and prestige to the nation state, but the Empire also had to be sold to the taxpayers of metropolitan Britain. One major marketing exercise was the “Great Exhibition”3 at Crystal Palace, south London, in 1851. This was a large scale show that was equal parts trade fair, political propaganda and exercise in nation building. Visitors, estimated to number 43,000 a day, could see “the world for a shilling”. Stands from the colonies presented wondrous products and curiosities: cod liver oil (Newfoundland), exotic fruits and flowers (the West Indies), the skins and meat of the kangaroo, the possum, the duck-billed platypus, the teeth of the sperm whale and the feathers of the sooty petrel (Australia), ostrich eggs and a mighty elephant’s tusk weighing 103 pounds (South Africa). But if the Great Exhibition was a show of Britain’s industrial strength and colonial muscle, it was also a display of shameless plunder. Along with technological feats such as the prototypes of fax machines and state-of-the-art weaponry came the ostentatious parading of the Koh-i-Noor, the dazzling diamond that had been “confiscated” from Duleep Singh by the East India Company in the days of the Raj. The appropriation was just. Victoria was Empress of India.
Even before the Great Exhibition, Londoners in particular were entertained with exotic spectacle from India and Africa. What came from the remote outposts of the Empire was the unknown, the unheard and the unseen, harbouring wonder and danger in equal measure, as surely as Othello the Moor in his conversation with Desdemona’s father evoked “rocks, hills whose heads touch heaven”, and “cannibals that each other eat” (Act 1, Scene 3).
Visitors to the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in central London – a venue for fireworks displays and grand concerts – could also have seen two men playing percussion, one with a round tambourine, the other with two straight twelve-inch-long horse bones. This was in 1848, three years before the Great Exhibition.
One of the performers was a black man, William Henry Lane;4 the other was a white man whose face was smeared in burnt cork. Both were members of the Ethiopian Serenaders, a “blackface” minstrel troupe hailing from New Orleans, which had enjoyed enormous success in the New World, including a concert at the White House. By now, the word “minstrel”, once generic to the court entertainers and itinerant performers during the Middle Ages, had acquired a specific racial dimension with the birth and growth of slave songs and dances in America. The characters of Jim Crow, the plantation slave, and Zip Coon, the city dandy, became black archetypes and eventually white performers started to copy what they saw slaves doing, giving rise to the practise of “blackface”, whereby burnt cork would enable a whitey to become a darkey. For much of the 19th century, Black music in Britain came from across the Atlantic in such racialised forms.
The first African-American blackface troupe was the Georgia Minstrels in the 1860s, and they are largely credited as the act that opened the door for other forms of “authentic” Black performance of plantation melodies. They were followed by blackface troupes such as the Virginia Minstrels who played to packed houses in America. Such was America’s convoluted racial power structure that Whites copying Blacks became a norm to which Blacks had to submit, essentially copying those who were originally copying them.
That William Henry Lane and the Ethiopian Serenaders were drawing crowds in London two decades prior to this is important. Lane was a performer whom both Whites and Blacks wanted to imitate. He was also known as Master Juba, which for Victorians was a byword for darkest Africa. Juba was the capital of modern day Southern Sudan, from whence the explorer Samuel White Baker launched a number of expeditions that took him into Uganda. Juba was sign of all things exotic and dangerous. In Moby Dick, the narrator, Ishmael, evoking the unknown shores that a hardy sailor might discover on his lengthy voyages, talks dramatically of the remote land of Ptolemy and the kingdom of Juba.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, possibly in 1825, Lane grew up in New York and was a musician as well as a “hoofer”. He played banjo and tambourine, which is why he could also fill the role of the “Tambo” in the “Tambo and Bones”5 duo that supplied rhythms for singers and dancers in the minstrel troupes, supporting the high-energy choreography and spirit-raising tunes. Juba was a virtuoso performer who is regarded as one of the inventors of contemporary tap dance. One of his early admirers was Charles Dickens, who visited New York to write the investigative chronicles that were published as American Notes (1842). Dickens describes a performance by Juba at the fabled Five Points, a melting pot of black and Irish immigrant communities, painting a picture of the interaction of music and dance that practically jumps off the page.
… suddenly the lively hero dashes into the rescue. Instantly the fiddler grins and goes at it tooth and nail; there is new energy in the tambourine; new laughter in the dancers…
Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut, snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man’s fingers on the tambourine.6
These are significant observations because they pinpoint the interaction of both physical and musical expression in slave culture that would resonate down through the ages. Sounds and steps elide and blend into one integrated surge of creativity, galvanized by a rhythmic drive that unites the dancer’s body and the player’s deployment of the instrument. Tellingly, choreographic terms are also musical ones: a shuffle is a rhythm as well as a movement, and the shift from single to double pinpoints a key strategy in what would eventually become known as jazz, namely generating interest through alterations of tempo and accent. Time is fluid rather than rigid. Changing a count of beats engaged a dancer’s improvisatory prowess, pushing them to raise energy and creativity in the moment. All of which maps a clear path to the future – the 19th century shuffle will give way to swing, boogie and groove in the 20th century, and way beyond. This foundation is fundamental.7
The dance at which Juba excelled was called “The Breakdown”. This is yet another example of Black dance tied at the hip, so to speak, to Black music. Two or three dancers would gather and one by one they would improvise hops, taps, shuffles and jumps as inventively as possible, the point being to highlight the soloist. New Orleans jazz musicians would later perform solos during the “breaks” of an arrangement where some players dropped out in a mirror image of the convention in black dance, and many decades down the line funk musicians would make an art of “the breakdown” where drums and percussion took prominence as the horns and vocals momentarily stop playing in an arrangement.
Research into the precise origins of Black music in the African Diaspora is ongoing, and essential questions remain on how song and dance evolved and interacted over time so as to precisely determine the convergence between them. One historical fact that might explain why dance is so integral to African-American and African-Caribbean expression is the practise adopted by captains of slave ships in the Middle Passage of regularly encouraging the captured Negroes to dance in order to keep them healthy.
Negroes were thus made to dance to remain viable units of production in a slave economy. Negroes later danced to entertain. Negroes who danced could also be seen by arbiters of good taste as a corruption or adulteration of European styles, or atavistically holding on to savage African movements.
Whether they were allowed to sing on slave ships is unclear, but rhythmic movement took the form of “ring dances” and impromptu solos to the sound of fiddles played by the sailors as well as hand-clapping from the slaves. Dancers like Juba thus provided a conspicuous link to a past in which dance was part of a system of survival as well as a glimpse of a future in which black musicians brought a strong rhythmic sensibility to the fore, and it is no surprise that magic occurred when dancer and singer coalesced, as exemplified by James Brown, Prince and Michael Jackson.
Reviews of the 1848 European tour echo the excitement of Dickens’ description. The Theatrical Times described Juba’s movements as “grotesque and poetical”, which resonates with other perceptions of blacks at the time as excitable and wild compared to the propriety that was supposedly native to European behaviour. And though Juba became something of a sensation in Britain, and though his talent was feted, there is no escaping his status as an exotic, an otherworldly being who gave performances in an age when people of colour were largely seen as a source of wild mystery.
As one can tell from Dickens’ description, the dancers and musicians in the minstrel shows performed with verve and theatricality, but their exaggerated gestures such as rolling the eyes and strutting with the hips or backside reinforced the stereotype of Blacks as funny, lazy, backward, childish folk.
Minstrelsy is an extremely complex subject because it is borne of division within white America as well as between white and Black America. The first whites to black up were Northerners who imposed their vision of Southern Negroes on the world of entertainment, exposing the myth of progressive Yankee thinking and the ease with which stereotypes could cross the Mason-Dixon line. Blackface performances ritualized a form of control over African Americans, who were already living with enormous restrictions on their lives. What Northerners thought Blacks were like obfuscated how Blacks actually lived, and impacted on their worldviews, aspirations and sense of self. The place of the Negro in a dis-United States of America, with its regional, social and political conflicts, could only be problematic, and minstrel entertainment added to the confusion over the real identity of human beings introduced to the New World in dehumanizing circumstances.
Most perniciously, the defining traits of the minstrel archetype – frizzy hair, bulging eyes, rubber lips – transposed from literature to the packaging of household consumer items, the most obvious manifestation being golliwog dolls on the labels of marmalade, entrenched forms of offensive racial iconography. As such, blackface brought into play a set of crude audio-visual tropes that made invisible the individual trapped behind the painted mask. Touching on the replacement of the real by the constructed image, Ellen Gallagher, the African-American artist who has produced some of the most startling works of visual art of the 21st century, called minstrelsy the “first great American abstraction”.8
Yet minstrelsy was embraced by Blacks primarily because it afforded them economic opportunities, even in circumstances that set great store by buffoonery. The Georgia Minstrels won plaudits in America for its exacting standards of musicianship, which were so high that some members later joined prestigious string groups and opera companies.
In his fascinating history of Black Gospel music, People Get Ready,9 Robert Darden collates a number of alternative views on minstrelsy and quotes the scholar Dale Cockrell who argues that there was a degree of subversion on the part of the practitioners, who behind the masks passed comment on an unjust society. Speaking in the midst of constraints, finding a voice by way of codes, living a double life, has long been a part of the Afro-Diasporan condition.
Ultimately, Minstrel shows were a sign that White America, and by extension, White Europe, was unable to ignore Black America. The immense popularity of this form of entertainment in New York and London, and the numerous appearances of both white blackface and Negro blackface troupes makes it clear that plantation melodies and “Ethiopian dances” had captured the public imagination. The minstrel became one of the first influential cultural commodities that the New World exported to the Old.
It is worth noting that whilst there were parallel forms of plantation music and dance in the British West Indies – survivals of African song, parodies of European forms and satiric precursors of the calypso – none of these took on the dominance that minstrelsy and the “Negro Spiritual” had in the USA and were rarely exported in the 19th century. There are probably quite straightforward explanations. Black forms of music and dance in the USA were largely shaped by their minority status and majority white audiences always had significantly more spending power. In the British West Indies, Blacks were always a majority, but their cultural expressions remained within the group in communal, non-commercial forms, regarded as primitive and subversive of social order by the tiny white elite and the small culturally Eurocentric, brown middle class.
Besides, except for the moment of alarm over the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica, there was scarcely any interest in Britain over what was happening in the West Indies. Over Morant Bay there was a national quarrel amongst British intellectuals and writers over whether the savage repression (over 500 Blacks executed) directed by Governor Eyre could be justified. Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson and John Ruskin were on the negrophobic side backing Eyre, whilst Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill and T.H. Huxley called for Eyre to be tried for mass murder.10 But in general the West Indies was fading from national consciousness. What was coming from the USA, whether cotton or minstrelsy, was much more interesting.
From any perspective, the emergence of African Americans as the drivers of what became a cross-Atlantic musical culture was a surprising turn of events. Africans had been efficient beasts of burden on plantations, and they had not been brought to the Americas to sing songs, but their ability to make instruments from animal carcasses and execute invigorating dance steps showed that they could serve a purpose beyond the purely industrial. In the nineteenth century this was a circumscribed role. For the most part minstrels were figures only of fun, valued for their ability to “elicit shouts of laughter and applause”,11 and because the bulk of Negroes lacked access to other forms of expression regarded as more elevated, such as playing classical music in concert rooms, it was inevitable that many audiences came to believe that the only type of activity Blacks were fit for was this kind of clownery. This had uncomfortable resonances with the kind of “freakshow” of Georgian England, gawping at the disproportionate derrière – to the European eye – of a South African woman, Saartje, aka the Hottentot Venus, who become a sensation in 1810. Master Juba’s appearance with the Ethiopian Serenaders at the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in 1848 was not quite in that category of display; it was in a popular setting, and therefore much more in line with the lively, boisterous street entertainment provided by Black Billy Waters rather than the noble salon concerts of George Bridgetower.
By mid century, large-scale fairs and pleasure gardens were giving way to a new kind of venue for entertainment. The music hall grew from the noisy saloon bars of public houses where, for a small fee, punters were entertained by singers, players and dancers, although bills also included “specialty” acts, including jugglers, plate-spinners, knife-throwers, magicians, acrobats, strong men, puppeteers, mime artists and mind-readers, also known as mentalists. This cross-over with the world of the circus did not alter the fact that the core element of music hall entertainment was popular song, above all tunes in which the audience was encouraged to participate, mainly by repeating a chorus that followed the verses sung by the performer. Music hall thrived on songs that struck a chord with an largely working-class audience, which could be lively if not unruly. Lyrics and melodies had to have an immediate appeal and tap into the sentiments and concerns of the day. Traditional English songs such as “Pop Goes the Weasel” went down a storm, but so too did pieces by American songwriters, in particular those of Stephen Foster. Born in Pittsburgh and of Irish parentage, Foster was hugely influenced by Negro culture and he penned several minstrel tunes that became immensely popular around the world. British music hall patrons were known to enjoy numbers such as “Old Folks At Home”, “Oh! Susanna” and “Massa’s in the Cold Ground”. Being able to raise one’s voice in a convivial atmosphere with a tankard of ale and smoking tobacco in a clay pipe suited the needs of the new urbanites who were earning a living as machine-minders in factories.12
Such conviviality was regarded with distaste by the respectable middle classes. There were organisations such as the National Temperance League, whose moralist policy of zero tolerance of alcohol consumption was one of the most forceful attempts of the middle classes to “civilize” the workers. Evangelicals preached that if “the eyes of the Lord were everywhere”, so the bottom of a gin glass would be no less likely to be spared his scrutiny than the inhumanity of man against man – or heathens in need of conversion.13
For such middle-class Victorians, faith was a kind of empowering, multi-purpose energy that could improve material as well as spiritual health. A god-fearing working man would have the discipline and moral fibre to serve the cause of free trade and industrial expansion. Godliness, cleanliness, respectability and the saving of souls were the watchwords of Evangelism. Christian Missionary organizations existed on both sides of the Atlantic and it was one of the pioneering organizations in the New World, the American Missionary Association, that decisively broadened the experience and understanding that Britain had of Black music and musicians. Heavily involved in the Christian Reconstruction of the South following the ravages of the American Civil War in the 1860s, the AMA worked closely with the Freedman’s Bureau to increase educational opportunities for people of colour. Its membership was open to “any person of evangelical sentiments who professes faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, who is not a slaveholder or in the practise of other immoralities.” So said General Clinton B. Fisk, one of the Bureau’s assistant commissioners and it was his name that was given to one of the first major institution for Blacks in the Southern States – Fisk School, which was established on 9 January 1866, just three years after Abraham Lincoln made his historic Emancipation Proclamation.
The students were the sons and daughters of slaves who had to abide by a strict code of conduct, drawn up to foster their growth as individuals in what was a psychologically disorientating point in American history: the moment when those who had hitherto been seen as chattel would take their first steps to autonomy. The AMA insisted on imposing strict discipline on all aspects of the daily life of Blacks in order to achieve this goal.
George Leonard White was a music lover and he formed a chorus of AMA students under the direction of a talented black music teacher and pianist, Ella Sheppard, who joined the school in 1868. They made their debut in 1871 with a well-received performance of William Bradbury’s Cantata of Esther at the nearby Nashville Masonic Hall.14
By that time Fisk School had run into financial difficulties, and the premises needed maintenance; White had the idea of a tour with the choir to raise money. From this desire to sing in the name of Jesus, a blessed “symmetry of Evangelicalism and Utilitarianism”, was born the Fisk Jubilee Singers. With between five and nine members, the ensemble became the foremost international black artists of the Victorian Age. Among the vocalists in the first incarnation of the group were granddaughters of slaves such as Jennie Jackson as well as Maggie Porter (soprano) and bass singers Greene Evans and Isaac Dickerson as well as 8-year-old George ‘Little Georgie’ Wells who did short, light-hearted skits before the performance of the singers began in earnest.
They embarked upon their successful debut tour of cities in the American North in the autumn of 1871. It was clear that their voices were outstanding and that in Ella Sheppard the Fisk Jubilee Singers had a musical director with the skill and rigour to ensure that they performed effectively.
They had to overcome the cultural and political legacy of minstrelsy and its role in lowering the expectations of the artistic capabilities of people of colour. The prevalence of minstrelsy meant that groups of black singers would be perceived as minstrels, whether or not they were doing Jim Crow and Zip Coon. Toni P. Anderson points out in Tell Them We are Singing for Jesus (2010), her account of the early years of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, that ministers were reluctant to countenance them as a worthwhile Christian enterprise because of the connotations of burnt cork. Anderson uncovered an early advertisement for the group that tells its own story: “A band of Negro minstrels will sing in the Vine Street Congregational church this morning.” On several other occasions the group was unceremoniously referred to as “nigger minstrels”. Early visitors from England to the American South, such as the actress Fannie Anne Kemble, had written of the “wild and unaccountable” music of slaves15 while other commentators, like the 19th century Louisiana historian Grace King, wrote of their “incoherent, unintelligible words”. For such reasons, the Fisk group attempted to distance itself from slave associations. George Leonard White’s decision to call them the Jubilee singers shrewdly circumnavigated the issue of racial identity. The name did not signify that the singers were black.
For the same reason, it is not surprising that the group was reluctant to develop a repertoire that featured any kind of piece that could be readily identified as a slave song or plantation melody. According to Maggie Porter, the Fisk soprano, there were many free blacks who were keen to bury such music in “the grave of slavery”. This meant turning their backs on some forms of vocal expression that had been crucial to the psychological survival and self-expression of African Americans, such as the rhythmic chanting used to sustain morale during the backbreaking task of picking cotton – the work song or field holler, the most “African” forms of Black American music. These offered a vital form of emotional release because the slaves were hearing something that they themselves created outside of the instructions of a foreman.
Where the Fisk did draw on Black cultural traditions was in their repertoire of Negro Spirituals, where African voices drew on a range of European hymns to make something of their own. The question of how much “blackness” the Fisk were allowed to impart to their performances, in terms of their demeanour and gesture, was vexed. Early critics may have praised the beauty of their voices, but they also noted what was missing from their behaviour: they were not being too black. After seeing a performance, John Sullivan Dwight, a Boston critic wrote:
They do not attempt to imitate the grotesque bodily motions or the drawling intonations that often characterize the singing of great congregations of colored people in their excited religious meetings.16
Whether it took place in a wooden church or a tent revival, it is clear that the coming together of Blacks in excited, joyful voice clearly alarmed many whites; it was too close to “wildness”, too close to a loss of control that could upset the established social order. “Excitable” was the term applied to Negroes by colonial governors in Jamaica, while colonial administrators in Australia noted, when observing Aborigines, “the savage yells”, “diabolic whoops”, “contortions” and “shifting of their bodies” that could not refrain from movement. The context of racial prejudice that the Fisk Jubilee Singers had to operate within was thus all too real. Proximity to what could be seen as slave expression – any exuberant gesture or demonstrative behaviour – had to be avoided. Jubilee was not Master Juba so any double shuffle was off limits.
Regardless of these misgivings, Spirituals did enter the Fisk Jubilee repertoire. The string of concerts that the singers performed in packed churches in New York, netting close to $4,000 in the space of a week, marked their arrival as a national phenomenon. The highpoint of this tour was a performance for President Ulysses S. Grant at the White House. Even so, despite the recognition of their talent and the decorum of their performance, epithets such as “purely natural”, “rude” and “uncultivated”, “quaint”, “strange” and “wild” were all applied in reviews, indicating that there was still uncertainty over exactly what to make of these “dusky” singers.
The tour was sufficiently successful for George Leonard White to think about sending his charges to Europe. Newly formed competitors such as the Canaan Singers and Hampton Singers were threatening the success of the fundraising campaign, so it made good sense for White to arrange for a tour of England, because this was virgin and potentially lucrative territory.
Hence, in April 1873, the company sailed to Liverpool on the Batavia, on a voyage that took eleven days and resulted in several bouts of sea-sickness for some of the less hardy members of the ensemble.
Here was a ship that was carrying the sons and daughters of slaves to the hub of the slave trade, but they now had the status of passengers, unlike earlier black musicians for whom the sea had more uncomfortable meanings, such as Joseph Emidy, who as noted above, was kidnapped and forced to play jigs and reels on his violin for the sailors, after having performed opera in Lisbon. Fisk’s transatlantic crossing was, therefore, a powerful statement of progress for artists of colour.
The great and the good of England greeted the Fisk Jubilee Singers warmly. Among their most fervent supporters was Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, the philanthropist who had worked tirelessly for social justice in many areas of national life, including to improve working conditions in factories, mines and, famously, the notoriously dangerous lives of juvenile chimney sweeps. Shaftesbury also headed the Freedmen’s Aid Society of Great Britain, which was an auxiliary organization to the American Missionary Association. Like his transatlantic counterparts, Shaftesbury was a committed evangelical who believed that the world could only be made a better place by following the word of God. Artists such as Fisk could not fail to move a man of such deep emotional sensibilities and progressive political convictions.
Shaftesbury arranged a private concert at the Willis Rooms in St. James, London, in the presence of several high-ranking personalities on 6 May, 1873. The Duke and Duchess of Argyll attended and it was they who subsequently convened an audience for Fisk with Queen Victoria. Royalty was to meet the scions of slavery.
The press did not refrain from attaching political importance to the encounter. The Times declared: “It is remarkable that the company of Negro singers should have vaulted to the highest circles in the land.” But Ella Sheppard, musical director of the group, was not, according to the journal she kept on the tour, overwhelmed by the famously imposing British monarch. Her descriptions were far from fawning. Victoria was: “A stout, ruddy-faced lady, simply dressed in black.” She could not contain her great surprise at the monarch’s plain appearance, adding that the queen was a “matronly looking lady, dressed like ordinary mortals.”17
With Shaftesbury as a patron, many doors in British society opened for Fisk, and appearances followed at the Union Chapel in London as well as at venues in Scotland and northern England where, according to reports by the group members, they were granted good receptions at hotels – which was not always the case on their first tours in America.
In a short space of time, Fisk became sufficiently fashionable to receive afternoon tea or breakfast invitations from prominent Londoners, including Prime Minister William Gladstone. He hosted them at Carlton House Terrace, specifically so that they could make the acquaintance of the Prince and Princess of Wales. The meeting had a historical resonance. This was the same venue at which the then Prince of Wales had met the young mulatto violin prodigy, George Bridgetower, around seventy years before.
The remarkable success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, which included a performance in front of a crowd of 7,000 at Hengler’s circus in Liverpool, would appear to lend credence to the idea that British society was willing to accept people of colour on their own artistic merits. But there are important caveats to that statement. Amid all the good press, the adulation and the attention from nobility, there is no escaping references to the otherness, if not the oddity of these artists. On a later visit to the UK in 1875, Mable Lewis, a recently recruited singer, recalled how the “dark complexion” of one of the founding members of the troupe, Jennie Jackson, fascinated the public. Lewis’s own thoughts on the way the singers were perceived was abundantly clear: “We were great curiosities.”18
Although the first phonograph recordings were made in the 1860s, the earliest incarnation of Fisk Jubilee Singers was not captured for posterity, though many sessions were recorded in the early part of the 20th century. A 1915 disc of the Fisk Jubilee Male Quartet – John Work II and James A. Myers (tenor), Everett Harris (baritone) and Lemuel Foster (bass) – is striking. The music sounds as if it has been made by many more than four people such is the depth of the low register lines and the rich, at times creamy, character of the harmonies. The 1870s’ description of voices of “superior power and sweetness” is borne out even by this greatly reduced version of the original group. What also contributes to this richness is the prevalence of long tones in arrangements, and the absolute clarity with which many notes are held, sometimes to the extent that the music acquires a slow pace that borders on a kind of suspended animation. Sounds are clearly enunciated by a group, who want to be anything but “wild” or “unintelligible”.
Call and response, one of the central tenets of black Diasporan music, defines a piece such as “Little David Play on Your Harp”, where the contrast between solo and ensemble vocal parts is superb, the effect of which is enhanced by the use of lengthy pauses between lines. Other pieces such as “Oh, Mary, Don’t You Weep” stand out for the way that a soloist starts a line and the whole ensemble deftly completes it. Aside from its vocal richness, the quartet makes much creative capital from its changing configuration from one composition to the next.
Although the songs are performed a cappella, what stands out on several tracks, none more so than the gripping rendition of “Oh, Mary”, is the quartet’s sure mastery of rhythm. Here the beat, a steady insistent 4/4, upholds the arrangement and the pulse is so strong and regular that one can feel, or at least imagine, the time tapped out by hands or a percussion instrument.
One wonders: did the Fisk Jubilee Singers rehearse with a tambourine or handclaps to act as a metronome? Did they stomp their feet on the floor, or make movements of some kind in order to set a song’s pulse? History tells us that in the earliest known “prayer shouts”, in which slaves assembled in a ring, there was great emphasis on time-keeping by shuffling and sliding steps, and that the incidence of hand-clapping to the beat passed into the earliest Black Baptist churches.
Awareness of those critics who decried “grotesque bodily movement” may well have discouraged the Fisk singers from behaving in too expressive a way during concerts. However in 1876, Theodore F. Seward, editor of the New York Musical Gazette, addressed the issue of rhythm and speculated on what the singers may have been doing while lifting their voices to heaven:
The first peculiarity that strikes the attention is the rhythm. This is often complicated, and sometimes strikingly original. But although it is new and strange, it is most remarkable that these effects are so extremely satisfactory.
Another noticeable feature of the songs is the rare occurrence of triple time or three-part measure among them. The reason for this is doubtless to be found in the beating of the foot and the swaying of the body which are such frequent accompaniments of the singing. These motions are in even measure, and in perfect time; so it will be found that, however broken and seemingly irregular the movement of the music, it is always capable of the most exact measurement.19
According to gospel music scholar Robert Darden, it was Seward himself who was responsible for arrangements for the group that actually “smoothed out” some of the rough edges that he evokes in the above quotation, which highlights a lack of understanding of the fact that the original Negro spiritual was an improvised form, because nothing was transcribed, and singers in a congregation often added lyrics and exclamations at will. Fisk took the spiritual towards a form that was more sanitized. It became known as the Jubilee song. It was by no means a total loss, and one suspects that for the Victorian ear, the Jubilee’s rhythmic sensation would have been heightened by arrangements where, by careful phrasing, the singers created powerful momentum with their voices.
For example, on “Everybody’s Talk About Heaven” the singers raise the energy of their performance by executing a crisp jump in tempo in the last two beats of the final bar of the chorus, squeezing a volley of extra notes into the line without losing the sense of the “one” of the new bar. Energetic delivery was one of the most salient features of Fisk’s work and their form of phrasal punctuation has verve.
Their phenomenal popular and critical success in England would have been inconceivable had they not had the reassuring stamp of religion on their credentials. It is thus hard to escape the sense that “the colored singers” fulfilled a range of expectations amongst their white audiences. On the one hand, there was no denying that their talent and the power of their performances lent a degree of dignity to Black entertainment in comparison to minstrelsy. On the other hand, the Fisk Jubilee Singers were living proof of how “civilisable” the descendants of slaves could be, especially as one of the goals of the age was that the souls of savages and heathens would be saved.
The triumph of the Fisk Jubilee Singers remains one of the great building blocks in the internationalization of African Diasporic culture. It was Black America inviting Britain to embrace, if not confront, music often regarded as strange, weird or grotesque, but by no means lacking in appeal. And when one listens to both Negro spirituals, and its outgrowth, gospel, the overriding impression is the supreme self-possession and stout conviction of the performers. The wholehearted and incontrovertible sense of emotional anchoring; the safe haven of solidarity within an ensemble; the united front in the face of adversity; the common desire to “fit the battle of Jericho”: these are central tenets of music that is empowering, and by extension, political in a time of inequality. The spiritual’s aesthetic is “we’re gonna” not “we might”. I may only have “this little light of mine” but “I’m gonna let it shine”’. The onus is on affirmation rather than interrogation, a summoning of faith by way of earthly sounds.20
Fisk’s successful national tour did not go unnoticed in America, and it should come as no surprise that there were others who crossed the water in later years. Gospel music was one of the most vital forms of Black self-expression in Victorian times, primarily because the church was one of the few places of congregation where Blacks could enjoy a degree of autonomy denied to them elsewhere. And if the Fisk adapted their music for white audiences, there were other composers who came from the African-American church who were more forthright in their political statements. There was James A Bland, the son of a former slave who had found employment as a government clerk in Washington D.C. He has a claim to the title of being America’s first successful Black songwriter. Prominent in his 1860s’ repertoire was a song that overtly addressed the post-emancipation world: “De Slavery Chains Am Broke At Last”. That piece captured the wave of optimism amongst Black Americans at the end of the civil war, and there were several other songs that conveyed the sense that a new day was dawning for those who had lived in bondage.
Indeed, the idea of emerging from darkness into light defined some of Bland’s other enduring pieces. One was “In The Morning by the Bright Light”. Another was “Keep Dem Golden Gates Wide Open”. Perhaps the most celebrated was “Oh Dem Golden Slippers”. If the title sounds familiar it was because it was an irreverent variation of “Golden Slumbers”, a staple in the Fisk Jubilee repertoire.
Bland also followed the Fisk on a similar international path. Within a few years of enjoying success and making a name for himself in America, he travelled to Europe in the 1880s with the repertoire of songs he had written and secured bookings at major venues all over the Old World. He was reported as having performed for the great and the good in both England and Germany. The troupe of performers he led was clearly identified along racial lines, and made a no nonsense claim to being “the real thing”, as were Haverly’s Genuine Colored Minstrels, brought by the impresario Jack H. Haverly (1837-1901).
Notes
1. Prominent British and American abolitionists included Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, John Brown, Henry Ward Beecher, Zachary Macaulay, Granville Sharpe and William Wilberforce.
2. The Slave Trade Act of 1807 led to fines of up to £100 if ships were found with slaves on board by Royal Navy patrols. This enforcement sometimes led slave traders to throw their human cargo overboard if they were about to fall foul of the law.
3. See Michael Leapman, The World for a Shilling (Headline, 2001), p. 8.
4. Derek B. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis (Oxford Scholarship, online).
5. The Tambo ‘n’ Bones routine was a major contributor to the success of minstrelsy due to its visual novelty as well as rhythmic ingenuity.
6. Charles Dickens, American Notes (London: Chapman & Hall, 1842).
7. Edward Thorpe, Black Dance (Chatto & Windus, 1989), p. 13.
8. The comment featured in a text Gallagher wrote to accompany her retrospective at Tate Modern, London, 2013.
9. Robert Darden, People Get Ready (Continuum, 2004).
10. See Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London, 1962).
11. An 1847 advertisement for the Ethiopian Serenaders at the Princess’s Theatre, London has the strapline “Whose performances elicit shouts of laughter and applause.”
12. See Donald Clarke, Rise and Fall of Popular Music (Viking, 1995).
13. Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815-1872 (Faber and Faber, 1971).
14. Toni P. Anderson, Tell Them We are Singing for Jesus (Mercer, 2009), p. 28
15. Fanny Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation 1838-1839 (Harper & Bros, 1863).
16. Quoted in Toni P. Anderson, Tell Them We are Singing for Jesus, p. 131.
17. Quoted in Anderson, op. cit., p. 54.
18. Anderson, op. cit.
19. Robert Darden, People Get Ready (Bloomsbury, 2005).
20. Donald Clarke, Rise and Fall of Popular Music.