Jubilee Singers, Launched on Stormy Seas
The company as it left Nashville, October 6th, 1871, followed by the good wishes, prayers, misgivings and anxieties of the whole University, numbered thirteen persons.
From: 1871 C.E. To: 1872 C.E.
Location: Nashville, TN, U.S.A
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
“Launched on Stormy Seas” from The Story of the Jubilee Singers, With Their Songs by J. B. I. Marsh, 1877.
The company as it left Nashville, October 6th, 1871, followed by the good wishes, prayers, misgivings and anxieties of the whole University, numbered thirteen persons. These were Mr. White, who was at the same time the captain, supercargo, pilot, steward and crew of the ship; Miss Wells, the Principal of an American Missionary Association school at Athens, Alabama, who took the oversight of the girls of the party; and eleven students—Ella Sheppard, Maggie L. Porter, Jennie Jackson, Minnie Tate, Eliza Walker, Phoebe J. Anderson, Thomas Rutling, Benjamin M. Holmes, Greene Evans, Isaac P. Dickerson, and George Wells.
The day after reaching Cincinnati the Singers met with the Rev. Messrs. Hallsy and Moore, the pastors of the two leading Congregational churches of the city, who were so delighted with their songs that they immediately arranged to hold praise meetings in their churches on Sunday, the next day, that their people might have the pleasure of hearing them. Full audiences greeted them in both services. On Monday a free concert was given and a collection taken at the close. The audience was large but the contribution small.
Fisk Jubilee Singers, 1871. Image from book.
It was on this Sunday and Monday, so well remembered all over the world, that the great Chicago fire swept away the houses of 100,000 people and property to the value of $200,000,000. In Ohio, as everywhere else, people could scarcely think or talk about anything else, much less give money to any other object.
There had not been for ten years a week that would have been, to all appearances, such an unfavourable time for the Singers to commence their work. Out of money and in debt as they were, they donated the entire proceeds of their first paid concert, which amounted to something less than $50, to the Chicago relief fund. This was given in Chillicothe, and called out a card from the Mayor and leading citizens cordially commending to public patronage the two concerts that followed.
Here at Chillicothe they met with an indignity which was often repeated in the next year's experience. Applying at one of the principal hotels for entertainment, they were refused admittance because of their colour. Treated in the same way at a second, they only secured shelter at a third by the landlord's giving up his own bedroom to them to use as a parlour, and furnishing them their meals before the usual hour, that his other guests might not leave the house. This odious and cruel caste-spirit it was to be a part of their mission—little as it was in their plans and painful as it was in experience—to break down.
It was owing not a little to their triumphant success as singers, and to the story of the distinguished attentions they received from the people of highest rank and culture both in America and Great Britain, that the prejudice against colour, the hateful heritage of slavery, which was so prevalent and powerful as to make those insults common in their first year's work, was so broken down that they were quite unfrequent in their travels three years afterwards. People who would not sit in the same church-pew as a negro, under the magic of their song were able to get new light on questions of social equality.
Returning to Cincinnati to fill engagements for the Sabbath, they found a dense audience gathered at Mr. Moore's church, in spite of rainy and unpleasant weather. It was hoped that the increasing enthusiasm manifested in connection with these praise services would insure a good audience at the paid concert which had been appointed at Mozart Hall for Tuesday evening; for hotel and travelling bills were already assuming serious proportions. But the receipts were barely sufficient to defray the local expenses of the concert.
However, it was not altogether lost labour. “It was," said one of the dailies, “probably the first concert ever given by a coloured troupe in this temple, which has resounded with the notes of the best vocalists of the land. The sweetness of the voices, the accuracy of the execution, and the precision of the time, carried the mind back to the early concerts of the Hutchinsons, the Gibsons, and other famous families, who years ago delighted audiences and taught them with sentiment while they pleased them with melody."
Jennie Jackson's rendering of the "Old Folks at Home" as an encore, was received with rapturous applause. Mr. Dickerson sang the "Temperance Medley" here for the first time, and the class trembled for him, as he stood there with his knees beating a tattoo against each other, in a rusty coat that was as much too long for the fashion as his trowsers were too short for neighbourly acquaintance with his low shoes. But confidence came with the sound of his own voice, and the audience forgot the appearance of the singer who swayed them so with his song.
Journeying next to Springfield, to fill an appointment for a concert at Black's Opera-house, they found less than twenty people gathered to hear them, and with heavy hearts they announced that they would postpone the entertainment.
A Synod of Presbyterian ministers was in session here, and Mr. White obtained permission for the Singers to appear before them. Assigned a half-hour in which to sing, and state their cause, it was a full hour before the Synod would release them. And not only did they testify their delight “in a vociferous, heartfelt, and decidedly unclerical manner, with hands, feet, and voice;" but they passed a resolution “heartily commending them to the favour of the Christian community," and emphasized it by taking up a collection for their benefit of $105.
Working their way in a zig-zag path northward, they gave a concert at Yellow Springs, where the coloured Baptist church was kindly placed at their disposal. At Xenia two concerts yielded them $84, and afforded the coloured students of Wilberforce University a stimulus that was worth, in another way, quite as much more. For those were days in which anything well done by a coloured man was an inspiration to all the rest of his race to whose knowledge it came.
Sheet Music from book.
At London, their singing in Springfield before the Synod bore fruit in the active efforts of the Presbyterian pastor in their behalf. The Sabbath was spent in Columbus, the Singers taking the place of the choir at one of the churches, and singing at a Sunday-school concert which is remembered as an occasion of special interest.
At Worthington they met a hearty welcome from Prof. Ogden and his wife, their old instructors at Fisk, who had done work of lasting value in laying its foundation, but were now in charge of the Ohio State Normal School at that place. There they remained several days for much-needed rest, giving a concert meanwhile which, thanks specially to the active efforts of these two old friends, yielded $60. At Delaware their concert paid still better, and, for the first time on their trip, they were permitted to sit in the same parlours and at the same tables in the hotel as white people. Three concerts at Wellington netted them little more than enough money to take them on to Cleveland; where they sang on Sunday at the First Presbyterian and Plymouth Congregational Churches, with the satisfaction that their unique praise services invariably gave.
All this time they were living, as the old phrase has it, from hand to mouth—depending on the proceeds of one concert to pay the next morning's hotel charges and buy their railway-tickets to the next appointment. Any special collapse in an evening's receipts left them helpless till some friend stepped forward—as there was almost always some friend in such an emergency who did—and paid hall and hotel bills.
But the great trial was that no light had dawned on their mission. They would have done better to stay at home if they were to make nothing above expenses. So scantily clad were they that Miss Sheppard was obliged to travel one rainy day with no protection for her feet but cloth slippers. It was not until some time after the biting weather of the Northern winter, to whose severity they were quite unused, had fully set in that Mr. White was able, by borrowing $5 that had been given to Minnie Tate, and picking up $19 in other ways, to purchase overcoats for two of the young men, who had really been suffering for want of them.
In one way and another a comfortable outfit had been secured for the young women; but such were the varieties of style represented that it was not uncommon for Ella Sheppard to be asked if Minnie Tate was her daughter—the former being twenty and the latter fourteen. And Jennie Jackson, who was nineteen, was sometimes taken to be the mother of Eliza Walker, who was fourteen.
The coolness, amounting often to indifference and sometimes to suspicion, with which even many of the warmest friends and supporters of the American Missionary Association looked upon this new agency for raising funds for its work, was one of the specially discouraging and trying features of the enterprise. Ministers were often loth, and not unnaturally, to let the Singers into their choirs; and if they gave them the use of their churches for a praise meeting, they sometimes showed a strong inclination to take their own seats among the audience and near the door!
But Mr. White's grip upon his purpose was not easily loosened, and he learned to let none of those things move him, knowing that the enthusiasm of these doubting friends after the service was almost sure to be in about an inverse ratio to their expectations before it.
During these days of experiment and trial Mr. White was loaded down with the work of at least four men. In other enterprises of this sort—and the same plan was afterwards found to be essential to the largest success of the Jubilee Singers—it is considered necessary to have a business manager, who lays out the route, visits or corresponds with editors and public men, and arranges the general plan of the campaign. Then an advance agent goes forward and puts these plans in operation, while his alternate accompanies the troupe to take up the tickets, pay the bills, and look after the details of the evening's management. A musical director arranges the programme, drills the singers, and answers the rattling volley of questions from curious and admiring friends. And where schoolgirls are in the company, and especially those hitherto unused to self-care and the demands of cultivated society, a governess is needed to look after their health and deportment.
In those early days the duties of general manager, advance agent, musical director, ticket-seller, and porter all fell to Mr. White. When the Singers halted somewhere for rest, he pushed ahead to lay out a new route; sometimes, when but a few appointments remained, he left Miss Wells and Miss Sheppard, the pianist, to attend to them while he went off to make new ones. The Singers he kept in drill the best he could. A rehearsal of some piece on their evening's programme was often the first course when they gathered at the dinner-table.
Sheet Music from book.
With all this work on his hands, there lay on his heart the burden of increasing debt and the consciousness that, while the business affairs of the University were needing his presence, the fact that he was earning no money and sending them no encouragement was adding to the uneasiness and anxiety of his associates at home. Many a time their last dollar was paid out for provisions; and he and they found frequent occasions to adopt the prayer of the old slave-song:
"O Lord, O my Lord, O my good Lord!
Keep me from sinking down."
But with a stedfast Christian faith, that seemed little less than obstinacy to those who could not read the Divine leadings, he held on.
Marsh, J. B. I., editor. The Story of the Jubilee Singers, With Their Songs. Hodder and Stoughton, 1877.
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