"Tell Them We Are Singing for Jesus": The Original Fisk Jubilee Singers and Christian Reconstruction, 1871-1878 (review)

When the notable English preacher Theodore Spurgeon first heard the Fisk Jubilee Singers, he wept. Later that day, he told his congregation that the singers "preach through their singing" (128). The story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers is one of the most well-known tales of American music during the nineteenth century, and its historic fundraising tours that served to keep a struggling black school solvent during Reconstruction introduced the world to the spiritual. Despite numerous retellings of the story and the vast amounts of critical attention that this important moment in America's musical past has generated, Toni Anderson adopts a new perspective, re-examining the evidence to reveal how the Fisk Jubilee Singers were, in fact, preaching through their singing. More specifically, Anderson's "Tell Them We Are Singing for Jesus" explores not only how the American Missionary Association (AMA) "perceived the Jubilee Singers as co-laborers in its great missionary endeavor to change American society" (xiii), but also how the singers themselves, in most cases, subscribed to this mission. As she explains, the "AMA's Christian Reconstruction worldview governed every aspect of the Jubilee Singers' historic seven years of fundraising campaigns and influenced the lives of its individual members" (xii).

This book is a well-documented and enjoyable read that will appeal both to laypeople interested in learning the story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and to scholars interested in the Reconstruction era, the AMA, or the emergence of the spiritual in American and European thought. Chapters 1 and 2 recount the famous story, exploring the connections between the AMA and Fisk University and detailing the university's financial difficulties, the beginnings of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and their first tour. In the following chapters, Anderson provides a fresh take on the well-known story by examining how the AMA's ideology affected the Jubilee Singers and how the singers adapted to or ascribed to that ideology. One seldom-remembered aspect of the ensemble's story is that the singers became employees of the AMA after three months of touring and remained employees for the rest of the ensemble's life. Anderson uses lesser-known primary sources to flesh out the story of their English/European tours in chapters 4, 5 and 6, ultimately documenting the stark contrast between the American racism directed toward the singers and their widespread European acceptance. These chapters also highlight the Jubilee Singers' evolution from university fundraising to fundraising for African missionary work, in some cases focusing purely upon Christian evangelism. Of particular interest are the details about the Jubilee Singers' mutually influential appearances with Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey, suggesting a place for the ensemble in the story of revival and gospel singing. Anderson's final chapters focus more directly upon the singers themselves, exploring how the AMA's ideals affected their lives, both positively and negatively. She concludes with fascinating biographies of Ella Sheppard Moore and Frederick J. Loudin, the two best-known Jubilee Singers. An appendix provides shorter biographies of the other members of the ensemble.

Anderson's account of the Jubilee Singers facilitates the reconsideration of some underlying assumptions about the tours and the singers. While it is certainly true that the ex-slaves who comprised the bulk of the very first choir were actively inculcated into a particular worldview by the white AMA employees who taught them at Fisk, the singers were not as marginalized as they might at first appear. In fact, they exerted a fair amount of agency over their activities and on the music they performed. Ex-slave Ella Sheppard arranged and regularly rehearsed many of the spirituals that the choir sang (41), and even after years of touring and thousands of performances of the concert spiritual, the singers would occasionally extemporize a spiritual in a folk style for themselves (261 n...