The American Experience, winner of the Primetime Emmy.
They were secret songs, songs of sorrow and redemption. These former slaves
would sing them to worldwide acclaim on an impossible journey where they would
sacrifice everything. Jubilee singers, sacrifice and glory, tonight on the
American Experience. The American Experience is made possible by
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American Dream. Hello and welcome to the American Experience. I'm David McCullough.
Courage is a powerful old theme in the story of America. The courage to cross
great oceans for the chance of a better life. The courage to defy tyranny. The
courage to stand up for one's convictions. Our film is about nine very courageous
and gifted young Americans who in 1871, six years after the Civil War, set off
from Nashville, Tennessee not to cross the Rockies or sail around the horn, but
to save a failing university that meant everything to them. They were the
Jubilee Singers from Fisk University heading north on a first tour. All but
two were former slaves. Several were still in their teens. They had no money,
no reputation, no experience performing on the road. And the ridicule and menace
they faced because of their color were all too real in a land whereby then
everybody supposedly had equal rights. Their strength was in their faith, faith
in God, faith in education, and faith in the transcendent spirit in the old songs
they sang. Cabin songs from slave times. Swing low sweet chariot. Steal away. Were
you there when they crucified my Lord? The Jubilee Singers were the first to
perform these songs before white audiences. It was music to touch the
hearts and souls of men and women everywhere. And there would come the
moment at historic Plymouth Church in Brooklyn when suddenly the power of
their message became evident as never before. Jubilee Singers, Sacrifice and
Glory by producer Llewellyn Smith and co-written by Andrew Ward.
In 1855, a Tennessee slave named Sarah Hannah Shepard discovered that her
daughter, Ella, had been trained to spy on her by their white mistress. Tormented,
despairing, Sarah set off to drown her little girl, then herself. But Providence
intervened in the form of an old slave woman. Mother caught me in her arms and
while rushing to the river to end it all, was overtaken by Aunt Viney who cried
out, don't do it honey. Don't you see the clouds of the Lord as they pass by? The
Lord has got need of this child. My mother took courage and walked back to
slavery to await God's own time. Ella Shepard. Ella would fulfill the prophecy
in a way Sarah never imagined through Sarah's own songs of sorrow and
redemption. One day Ella would perform them in palaces, cathedrals and concert
halls with a choir of emancipated slaves and build a great university out of the
sacred songs of Jubilee.
Ella Shepard's father purchased her out of bondage and fled with her to Ohio
where she learned to read and write and play the piano. At the end of the Civil
War she returned to Tennessee. Determined to become a teacher, she enrolled at a
struggling school for freed blacks in Nashville named Fisk University. Fisk was
a university in name only. A freedman school established in an abandoned army
hospital barracks. Fisk was dedicated to training men and women like Ella to
educate African Americans across the South. The school was run by the American
Missionary Association called the AMA. Fisk's treasurer was a zealous missionary
from New York named George Leonard White, a Union veteran of Gettysburg and
Chancellorsville. White's job was to keep Fisk afloat but he had been a choir
master and a band sergeant and his true passion was music. Entranced by the
beautiful voices of the young former slaves who studied at the school, he
began to assemble the most gifted into a chorus. We were especially fond of music
and gladly gave half of our noon hour and all our spare time to study under
Mr. White. We made rapid progress. Ella Shepard. In Ella Shepard, George White
recognized someone whose passion for music matched his own. White appointed
Shepard assistant choir director making her at age 18 the school's first black
instructor. Together, White and Shepard rehearsed the student chorus in popular
songs of the day and musical pageants like the cantata of Esther.
But White was most entranced by the mysterious moving songs that Ella
Shepard and the students sang for themselves. They were called cabin songs,
plantation melodies, spirituals, and jubilees. Folk hymns composed by slaves
for worship and solace.
You start singing a song and when you're singing it first according to the
slaves you're just singing the words but after a while it's almost like therapy.
It begins to take the frown out of the face. The shoulders begin to come back to
their natural position. What's happening is you're going through a cleansing
process. These people were not readers. They were not writers. They had to sing
songs with a few words that they could learn once, carry on forever, that
everybody could sing at the same time. So you're going to find spirituals that
will say swing low sweet chariot coming for to carry me home. Swing low sweet
chariot coming for to carry me home. Just a few words which are going to be sung
over and over.
But education, not music, was the purpose of schools like Fisk University. Under
slavery, reading and writing had been forbidden, punishable by whipping,
imprisonment, or worse. With emancipation, waves of freedmen descended on any
school they could find, desperate to learn how to count their new wages, write
the new names they had chosen for themselves, read the ballot, and the Bible.
When Fisk opened its doors in January of 1866,
hundreds of former slaves crowded into day school and night classes at the
school's barracks. But the school was continually on the verge of financial
collapse. By 1868, it couldn't pay its creditors or even its teachers. One
instructor apologized for asking for her back pay, but it was cold, she said, and
she had no shoes. Tuition was $12 a year at a time when farm laborers earned as
little as $8 a month.
As treasurer, George White put up his own savings to keep the school afloat. To
collect unpaid tuitions, he wrote letter after letter to already hard-pressed
parents. We spare no pains or expense in the education of the people. I write
thus plainly and earnestly, yet kindly, because a great and good enterprise is
in danger of being crippled by this lack of prompt fulfillment of your
obligations. George White. Dear Mr. White, here is six dollars. That is all I have at
present. The times are so hard that I had to use it at home. Give my love to
Ellen and tell her to be a good girl. Rachel Ferguson. When students uncovered
rusty chains from an abandoned slave pen, White sold the chains for scrap iron to
buy Bibles and spellers. To raise more money, White led his choir to neighboring
towns to sing for donations, despite the dangers. There was no lacking of
opposition to the establishment and maintenance of schools for the freedmen.
People who had subscribed to the view that, one, blacks were inferior, they were
childlike, they were irresponsible, could not believe that energy and resources
should be expended on the training of people who could not absorb the training
anyway. After all, there's talk about they're becoming voters and full
citizens, especially in 1866 and 1867, and you've got to put a stop to this.
Night writers, like the Ku Klux Klan, assaulted and whipped Fisk students for
teaching in the countryside. A young choir member, Benjamin Holmes, was shot at
in his classroom, and soprano Maggie Porter returned one New Year's to find
that local whites had celebrated the holidays by burning her school to the
ground.
One evening, White and his singers found themselves stranded at a railway depot
in a small town and surrounded by a jeering mob. Seeing Mr. White among us,
word soon traveled that he was a Yankee nigger school teacher. Threatenings
began their evening. We prayed through song for deliverance. Mr. White stood
between us and the men and directed the singing. One by one, the crowd left off
their jeering and swearing and slunk back until only the leader stood near
Mr. White. He finally took off his hat and begged us with tears falling to sing
again. Ella Shepard.
By 1871, Fisk's barracks were rotting away. The wind whistled and groaned so
fearfully that we trembled in our beds, thinking the sounds were the cries of
lost spirits of the soldiers who had died in them. Privations began to tell
on the vitality of the students. There was no money, even for food. That fall,
George White seized on a daring plan. He proposed to take his singers on a
fundraising tour of the North. White believed his young students were
convincing proof of what higher education could do for the Freedmen.
By October, White and Ella Shepard had assembled and rehearsed their best
singers. All but two had been slaves.
Tenor Thomas Rutling, a former house slave, was almost expelled from Fisk for
passing notes to female students. One newspaper deemed him the best tenor in
Tennessee. Benjamin Holmes, 23, survived his semester of countryside teaching. As
a slave, he'd secretly taught himself to read and was now a deacon of Fisk's
chapel. Like Holmes, 18-year-old Maggie Porter had continued to teach in
country schools, uncowled by threats and arson. 21-year-old baritone Isaac
Dickerson had been a Confederate colonel's valet in the war.
Soprano Jenny Jackson, age 19, was a granddaughter of President Andrew
Jackson's body servant. Youngest of the nine singers was 14-year-old contralto
Minnie Tate, who as a free girl had been taken in by German settlers.
The parents of white singers were afraid to let their children go. Fearing
ridicule, even disgrace, his fellow teachers opposed the tour and the
American Missionary Association refused to help. George White wanted to target
mainly white Christian audiences and generally the audiences he was going to
be searching for were the same audiences that the AMA already appealed to for
support. But there's even more to it than that. Black singers did not appear on
stage during this era except in the minstrel show, and the minstrel show was
a very stereotypical and derogatory image of African Americans. Good
upstanding Christian people did not go to these kinds of entertainments.
Many Friedman schools had already been crushed by debt and violence. White was
convinced that he and his singers had been chosen by God to save fisc.
"'Tis time to root hog or die," he wired the AMA.
"'I'm depending on God, not you.'" With the last $40 of the school's treasury in
his pocket, White took his singers on the road.
Not one of us had an overcoat or wrap. Mr. White had an old gray shawl, taking
every cent he had, all his school treasury could spare, and all he could
borrow. Mr. White started in God's strength, October 6, 1871, with his little
band of singers to sing the money out of the hearts and pockets of the people.
Ella Shepard.
White's plan was to lead his singers north to perform along the old
Underground Railway, starting in Cincinnati and following the network of
abolitionist homes and churches that had once relayed escaped slaves to Canada.
For the repertoire, White chose European classical and popular songs, some
composed by himself. At their debut in Cincinnati, the audience received them
warmly enough, but donated less than $50. The next day, news reached the singers of
the great fire in Chicago. They gave all their money to the Relief Fund and left
town empty-handed.
Night after night, it was the same story. Crowds loved their singing, but the
collection plate said it all. Fifty or sixty dollars, barely enough to cover
expenses. You are staying in flop houses or in boarding houses. You can get your
meals there. The meals were nothing to write home about. The rooms were generally
dirty. They were not well-kept. The vaudevillians of this period referred to
them as, don't look under the bedrooms. There was probably bugs in the beds.
There were probably rats around. There were always signs in the railroad
stations saying, nigger, read and run. And sometimes it would be below the signs,
scratched on, and if you can't read, run anyways. But no one turned back. All we
wanted, recalled soprano Maggie Porter, was for Fisk to stand. If the singers
don't bring back some money, the school is going to fold. And so that the singers
were having to sing at every opportunity. Sometimes they would sing in churches.
They would sing for private parties. They would sing for teas. Sometimes they
would ask them to stand on a busy thoroughfare. Many a time our audiences in
large halls were discouragingly slim. Our strength was failing under the ill
treatment at hotels and on railroads. Poorly attended concerts and ridicule.
Besides, we were too thinly clad for the increasing cold of a northern climate.
Ella Shepard. The grueling logistics of the failing tour were George White's
burden. Many times he would have to leave Ella Shepard with the students, with the
rest of the singers, to get ready for the next concert while he went ahead to the
next city. There he would have to secure a hall, talk with all of the ministers in
the area to try to drum up support, build an audience, advertise. He would have to
leave the students at the station, because no hotel would take them in, and
go up and down the streets knocking on doors to try to find Christian people
who would house the singers overnight. It is true we are not received like the
Grand Duke Alexis, but we are willing to wait a little longer till the good time
coming comes. I feel that our enterprise must be a success, for God is with us and
has given us favor. Benjamin Holmes.
Week after week, performing with little rest, White and the singers endured
rheumatism, coughing fits, bronchitis. Their clothes ran to rags. Sickly Ella
Shepard begged White to send her home, but White refused. He had begun to
experiment with the singer's repertoire, and now needed Shepard more than ever.
Initially they would have maybe 17 numbers that were, quote, white man's
music, and they would include some spirituals, often as encores. But when
they saw how those spirituals were received, they began to include more and
more spirituals. They arranged them while they were on tour, and that
responsibility fell to Ella Shepard. So here's Ella Shepard drilling the
singers, arranging new melodies, teaching them, practicing the spirituals, all
during the time that they're concertizing night after night after
night. It's incredible.
The slave songs were associated with slavery in the dark past, and
represented the things to be forgotten. They were sacred to our parents. We did
not dream of ever using them in public. It was only after many months that
gradually our hearts were opened to the wonderful beauty and power of our songs.
On the 16th of November, the weary singers arrived at Oberlin College in
Ohio to sing before a national convention of influential ministers.
This time they reached past cantatas and ballads, back to the secret music they'd
sung behind closed doors, the sacred songs of their mothers and fathers.
I ain't got long to stay here.
They started singing, Steal Away, and all of a sudden there was no talking, and then
they said you could hear soft weeping in the faces of the people reading, and I'm
sure that the Jubilee singers were joining them in tears because sometimes
when you think about what you're singing, particularly if you believe it, you can't
help but be moved. After their small triumph at Oberlin, words spread from
congregation to congregation. Letters and telegrams flew ahead of them, urging
other small-town churches to open their doors.
Yet the singers still needed a name. After a night of prayer, George White had
an inspiration. Children, he told the troop, it shall be Jubilee singers. The
name was taken from chapters 25 of Leviticus from the Bible, after the the
Jewish year of Jubilee. The Jewish year of Jubilee occurred every fiftieth year,
and in the year of Jubilee were provisions for debt relief, provisions
for redemption of property, and for emancipation of slavery. That winter,
White rushed to add more spirituals to the repertoire. Jenny Jackson brought
him, I'll hear the trumpet sound. Ella Shepard taught White, her mother's
favorite lullaby, Swing Low Sweet Chariot. When the Fisk students reached New York
in December, it was make or break. Three days before Christmas, Henry Ward
Beecher, the most famous preacher in America, had invited them to sing at his
weekly prayer meeting. Beecher's Plymouth Church in Brooklyn included some of
America's richest and most influential families. If the singers failed here, they
wouldn't even have enough money to get back to Nashville. I shall never forget
the rich tones of the young men and women as they mingled their voices in a
melody so beautiful and touching. I scarcely knew whether I was in body or
out of body. Christavus Pike. Henry Ward Beecher was on his feet and with his
hands in his pockets, he brought out five dollars and told everybody to follow
suit. That was our start. Every church wanted the Jubilee singers to sing for
them from that time on. Maggie Porter. Even the American Missionary
Association dropped its opposition and scrambled to get on board. It would now
take five of their agents, full-time, to accomplish what White and Shepherd had
been doing on their own. Touring Connecticut, they brought in a
phenomenal $1,200 a week. In New Haven and Hartford, hundreds of new fans were
turned away. I don't know when anything has so moved me, wrote Mark Twain, as did
the plaintive melodies of the Jubilee singers. In Washington, they delighted
President Ulysses S. Grant and a concert hall filled with congressmen and
diplomats. If the great book were destroyed today, wrote one reviewer, it
could be recreated out of the fabric of these very songs. Success is now at hand.
Our concerts are so well attended that many are doomed to stand and many more
leave for want of room. In some cities, excursion trains are going to run to the
places where we sing. The people seem to be perfectly frantic about the Jubilee
singers. Ellie Shepherd. Now, when the Jubilees encountered Northern racism,
protests often followed. When the singers were later refused
accommodations on Pullman cars, George Pullman integrated the cars himself and
they stayed integrated for another quarter century. When a New Jersey hotel
manager threw them out after realizing they were not blackface minstrels,
leading citizens took them in and an embarrassed Board of Education opened
its schools to black children for the first time. These singers, wrote one
newspaper, are doing a great work for humanity. They are by their sweet songs,
molding and manufacturing public sentiment.
New life had come into our bodies. We sang as if inspired. We not only paid
the debts at home, we carried home $20,000 with which was purchased the
site of our new school. We returned to Fisk amid great rejoicing. They returned
to a school under siege. In Nashville, as in many southern cities, northern troops
stood guard against vigilantes. The new university president, Erastus Milo
Cravath, was determined to oppose white hostility by making Fisk a southern
showcase. He set out to build Jubilee Hall, a grand edifice to capture the
imagination of donors and frustrate the torches of the Ku Klux Klan.
By 1873, 74 in the south, there were a series of fires and many of those places
identified as schools for the former slaves come under the torch. But Jubilee
Hall will stand as a mighty structure with walls more than 12 inches thick of
stone and brick. It will be adorned by a bell tower which can also serve as a
watchtower. Building Jubilee Hall was going to take a lot more money. After
less than two weeks rest, Shepard and White reorganized the Jubilee Singers
and took them back on the road. Now they were paid professionals supporting a
large entourage of managers, matrons, tutors, and advancemen.
In July of 1873, at Boston's World Peace Jubilee, the singers were called on to
make themselves heard over a 1,000-piece orchestra, a chorus of 10,000, and a
battery of cannons in a colossal performance of the Battle Hymn of the
Republic. With voices that rang clear, reaching the utmost of the vast building,
we took the audience by storm. Strauss, the German composer of Waltz music, was
present and threw up his hat during the burst of applause which followed. Georgia
Gordon. They were representing a new freedman, a new kind of black person. The dignity,
the carriage, the voice, and the articulateness of these young people
surprised large numbers of northerners.
Not every northerner was one over. The New York world called them trained
monkeys who sang with a wild, darky air. The Newark Evening Courier listed them
as if they were items from a slave dealer's catalog. In Baltimore, a ticket
seller refused to sell the singers admission to their own concert. And there
was more. Other black schools began their own choirs. Hucksters passed
themselves off as the original Jubilee singers. All this further popularized the
spirituals, but cut into the Jubilee's receipts. The singers were forced to
seek out new fields for harvest thousands of miles from home. In April 1873, they
set sail for the British Isles. Only one day after their London debut, the singers
were astonished to find themselves performing before none other than Queen
Victoria herself. The Queen wore no crown, no robes of state, but it was the Queen in
flesh and blood. I saw her. I heard her deep, low voice saying,
tell them we are delighted with their songs. I wondered why the Queen did not
speak these words to us. We were within hearing. Maggie Porter. They are real
Negroes, wrote the Queen in her journal that night. Come from America and have
been slaves, they sing extremely well together. The Queen's pleasure opened
every door. Prime Minister Gladstone, the Prince of Wales, dukes, duchesses, and
earls were transfixed by their songs. And the singers were quickly embraced by
evangelicals crusading to save British souls. At Reverend Charles Spurgeon's
vast tabernacle, they sang to a congregation of 6,000. Across England,
Scotland, and Ireland, they were a phenomenon. Books and newspapers
chronicled their rise from slavery. At concert after concert, their portraits
and songbooks sold out to British fans. Thomas Rutling and Isaac Dickerson left
behind a string of broken hearts. These young people are perfect Victorians. They
are dressed in Victorian elegance. They deport themselves in a very Victorian
manner. Remember, the world was not accustomed to looking at black
Victorians. This may be the inspiration as much as the songs and the music for
Queen Victoria to allow her portrait painter to paint a beautiful Victorian
portrait of these young Jubilee singers.
The British were fascinated by their color. They said Mabel Lewis and Georgia
Gordon could pass as English bells and Minnie Tate as coming from the south of
France. Dark complexion to Jenny Jackson was most sought after of all. She had no
peace. She would take her umbrella and beat her way along with it. One time a
crowd was following us, and when we got to the hotel, the proprietor had to take
the hose to drive the crowd away. Mabel Lewis.
Mabel Lewis enjoyed teasing her fans. One time we heard someone say, I am going to
speak to some of them and see if they speak English. She came up to me and said,
do you all speak English? Ugh, I said. Do you speak English or do you just learn
the songs? Baka Migli Pan Martu, I answered, and she said, I guess they only
sing in English. In the spring of 1874, the Jubilee singers returned home in
triumph with another $50,000 for the construction of Jubilee Hall. No one can
estimate the vast amount of prejudice which has perished under the spell of
their marvelous music, declared the Board of Trustees. Wherever they have gone,
they have proclaimed, to the hearts of men, the brotherhood of race.
But success in England had come at a price. Worn down by a relentless schedule,
an advanced man suffered a nervous breakdown. Typhoid fever carried away
George White's wife. White himself nearly died of a pulmonary hemorrhage.
Contralto Benetate had sung her voice to shreds, and the nagging cough Benjamin
Holmes had urged friends not to worry about turned out to be tuberculosis.
Throughout Tennessee and the rest of the South, the hopes of African Americans
were being dashed. The Freedmen's Bureau, established by Congress to enforce the
rights of emancipated slaves, had been abolished. Federal troops that had once
protected African Americans were gone. Many black schools shut down.
Former Confederates took over legislatures and began to replace laws protecting
black rights with new segregation codes. And despite all the singers had
sacrificed, Jubilee Hall was still only a hole in the ground. Fisk's president
Cravath knew this was because the AMA had been borrowing heavily from the
Jubilee Hall Fund to stave off its own bankruptcy. Cravath was anxious to get
the singers back on the road, not just to build up Fisk in Jubilee Hall, but to
rescue the overextended AMA. Reminding them of their evangelical mission, Cravath
prevailed on the exhausted Jubilees to embark on yet a third tour. In January
1875, George White and Ella Shepard organized a new troop of singers. Ella
and Thomas Rutling, Maggie Porter, and Jenny Jackson were the only original
Jubilees left. Among the newcomers was America Robinson, a Fisk student.
Engaged to classmate James Burruss. Dear James, this morning there was combat on
our behalf. A southern man was enraged because the proprietor took us in. A
northerner told the southerner that he was a half nigger himself. The southerner
attempted to throw the paper at the northerner, though the northerner struck him
on the mouth with a chair. Many boarders threatened to leave. America Robinson.
After long tours of America and Britain, the Jubilees traveled to Switzerland and
Holland to test the universality of their music.
Arriving in Amsterdam in winter of 1877, the singers were mobbed by
adoring fans. Our arrival created a greater sensation than a circus in the
United States. We could not go walking or shopping on foot because crowds of
children in wooden shoes surrounded us so closely that we could not get on. Ella
Sheppard. They performed for the Queen of the Netherlands and raised another
$10,000. But the non-stop schedule was wearing out George White and the singers.
Voice is the one thing that we can't camouflage. We can't put makeup on the
voice and have it come out a different way. So if you have a cold, if you're
tired, if you're hungry, all of these things come out in the voice. So you have
not only the physicality of singing and the problems of dealing with
working on stage, but you have on top of all of that the whole issue of the
pressure that these kids are under to prove a point. The point is that
African-Americans are educable people. That they are people who can gain from a
college education. Many people didn't believe that. That summer, White asked
Cravath to come help manage the troupe. He got more than he bargained for. Cravath
had no musical training, but he had big plans, starting with an ambitious tour of
Germany, birthplace of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. White was against it. I know
what is necessary to win musical success in Germany, White argued, but I see no
chance at all to accomplish it. But in the end, Die Jubiläumszanger were a
popular and critical sensation. What wealth of shading, what accuracy of
declamation. Something may be learned from these Negro singers. If only we will
consent to break through the fetters of custom. Die Jubiläumszanger. Even when
the Germans did not understand the words, they cried and smiled at the same places
as English audiences had. At Potsdam, they sang for Kaiser Wilhelm I. As the
Jubilee sang, Crown Princess Victoria, daughter of Queen Victoria of England,
burst into tears. Afterward, she remarked she hoped we did not think her silly, but
she could not help weeping. She is in mourning for a child, and the song
probably reminded her of the lost one. These songs, as you sing them, go to the
heart, explained the Crown Prince. They go through and through one. In later years,
many of the singers would remember these concerts as the crowning triumph of
their careers. But this was soon overshadowed by news from home. With
conditions worsening in the Tennessee countryside, hundreds of African
Americans were fleeing to the cities for refuge, cramming into slums. Epidemics
were rampant.
Tuberculosis claimed three Fisk students. Among them, the Jubilee's old friend and
colleague, Benjamin Holmes. We were all quite prepared for his death, wrote
America Robinson, but we all felt it deeply. Everybody loved Mr. Holmes.
They traveled from Berlin to Maderberg, Maderberg to Leipzig, on and on through
Germany. An astonishing 68 concerts in 41 towns in 98 days, not including
impromptu performances in churches, trains, and private homes. Many nights,
only six out of eleven were well enough to perform.
Ella Shepard collapsed and was sent to Holland to recuperate. Then Julia Jackson
suffered a stroke.
About four o'clock she got up and in attempting to get back into bed, fell
across it, unable to move herself. It never entered our minds that such a
dreadful thing as paralysis had taken hold upon her, but it was even so. It has
left one whole side of her, powerless. America Robinson.
A new baritone named Frederick Loudon blamed Cravath. You have only thought of
how much you could get out of the singers. Three years killed Mr. Holmes.
Ella is quite gone. Jenny Jackson is failing as all can see. Still, you seem
determined to drive ahead as if we were all superhuman. And as fast as we are
killed, you put in a new one. Frederick Loudon. These were no longer the
wide-eyed teenagers who had set out six years before. Most were now well into
their 20s. Almost every one of them had been offered opportunities to study at
British universities, perform for rival groups, or even strike out on their own.
And they knew their own worth. More and more they demanded a say in how the
troop would be managed. George White was used to running the group and giving
clear directions and mandating how things were going to go. But as the
membership and as the group evolved and became a professional organization, the
individual members had ideas equally about how things should go. And they
often clashed with George White. After a six-week recovery from near fatal
pneumonia, Ella Shepard rejoined the singers in Germany to find chaos. George
White, worn out from illness, railed at the singers he still called his children
and submitted his resignation. To Shepard's horror, Cravath accepted it. He
was already planning tours of Australia, South America, and the American West.
To keep the troop alive, Cravath asked Shepard to take over from White. After
prayer, Ella agreed on the sole condition that she and the exhausted
Jubilees return to Nashville at the end of their current engagements. There would
be no new bookings. Cravath called her a deserter.
Though I live to be an old woman, the scar of that word dessert will remain
upon my heart. As hard as I've worked for seven years, late and early, doing extra
work, to at last be called a deserter.
Ella stood her ground. She directed the troop for the three contentious months
it took to finish their engagements. Even Cravath could see that it was time.
Rivalries among the singers had become open. Morale was low. Nerves were frayed.
After almost seven years of touring together, singing night after night, the
Jubilee singers had had enough. At long last, the singers started for home.
As their ship approached American waters, they sang together one last time.
Many wept during the evening, and one lady followed me to my room weeping and
threw her arms around my neck and kissing me, cried, I do thank you. I never
felt such music before. How much good we might do not only for others, but for our
people and hearts. May our father forgive us, Ella Shepard.
The contrast between the world that the Jubilee singers left and the world which
they will return is considerable. They had been wined and dined and lionized
and praised all over the North and all over Europe, and had seen how a human
being could live. They had for them to come back to a world that has deteriorated even
since they left. Some never did come back. Thomas Rutling and Isaac Dickerson
refused to set foot in America and eventually died in England. The years of
touring reduced George White to an invalid. Like Benjamin Holmes, he died of
consumption. At his memorial service in 1895, a few of the Jubilees returned to
sing his favorite spiritual, Steal Away.
The singers who returned to Nashville were honored by Fisk for raising over
$160,000 to complete Jubilee Hall and save their school. But as emissaries of
the Freedmen, their contributions extended far beyond Fisk University. They
had introduced the world to the sacred hymns of their ancestors.
Ella Shepard eventually returned to Fisk to be the teacher that she had
wanted to become when she first arrived in 1868. By the time of her death at the
age of 63, she had become one of the most respected women of her day, a confidant
of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. And Sarah Hannah Shepard, the
mother who had once tried to drown Ella and herself rather than live in bondage,
lived out her life in her daughter's house, witness to the fulfillment of a
prophecy made back in the days of their bondage under the clouds of the Lord.
There's more about the Jubilee singers on the web. Here a reading from the book
Dark Midnight When I Rise. All this and more at the American Experience Online.
Lord, if I don't praise him, the wife's gonna cry out. Glory and honor, glory and honor, ain't got time to die.
Lord, I keep so busy servin' my master. Keep so busy servin' my master. Keep so busy servin' my master. Ain't got time to die.
When I'm givin' my all, and I'm givin' my all. When I'm givin' my all, and I'm givin' my all.
Ain't got time to die, cause it takes all of my time to praise my Jesus all of my time to praise my Lord.
If I don't praise him, the wife's gonna cry out. Glory and honor, glory and honor, ain't got time to die.
Now won't you get outta my way. Let's be praised by Jesus. Outta my way, let's be praised by Lordy.
I don't face him, the lock's gonna cry out
Glory and honor, glory and honor
Ain't got time to die
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