BOOK AND VIDEO REVIEW

Ward, Andrew.  _Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers
Who Introduced the World to the Music of  Black America_.  New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.  Pp. 493.  Biographical notes and index.
Hardcover, 9.32 X 6.42".  $25.00.  ISBN 0-374-19771-1.

Smith, Llewelyn and Andrew Ward.  _The Jubilee Singers: Sacrifice and
Glory_ (The American Experience).  Alexandria, VA: PBS Home Video, 2000. 56
minutes.  $19.98.  ISBN: 0780631439

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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:

Dave Thomson
<[log in to unmask]>

Copyright (c) 2000 Mark Twain Forum.  This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.


On 10 March 1873 in a letter to Tom Hood, Sam Clemens wrote, "I do not know
when anything has so moved me as did the plaintive melodies of the Jubilee
Singers" (_Mark Twain's Letters, Volume 5: 1872-1873_, p. 315).  The
musical influence of the Jubilee Singers can be found throughout any study
of Mark Twain's life; but who were these singers who left their imprint
upon American history less than a decade after the Civil War?

Andrew Ward's _Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers
Who Introduced the World to the Music of Black America_ is a life and times
saga that is crowded with characters and events that, while not always
bearing directly on the subject, help us to understand the milieu in which
the Singers moved.  A truly epic work, rich with scholarship and detail,
the book provides a definitive history on the subject which was long
overdue.  Ward gathered his primary source material from the Fisk
University Special Collections and the American Missionary Association
archives of the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University.  References
to the eight archives and many publications that were consulted for the
twenty-eight chapters are thoroughly documented with 1,328 notes.  Scholars
who want to pursue individual leads will be able to trace them easily.

A companion video documentary _The Jubilee Singers: Sacrifice and Glory_
provides a tip of the iceberg view which the book expands upon at length.
In his acknowledgments Ward, who was creative consultant and co-writer of
the documentary, pays tribute to Llewelyn Smith of WGBH Boston who co-wrote
and produced the film for helping him "think this story through and sharing
his many leads, finds, insights and resources."

_The Jubilee Singers: Sacrifice and Glory_ includes tasteful and believable
recreations of the Jubilees' experiences.  Eighty-nine year old Tennessee
church deacon Sam McClain provides a goose bumpy overture to the film with
his singing of "I Couldn't Hear Nobody Pray" which seems to resonate from
the 1860's.  The 1998/99 Fisk Jubilee Singers attired in authentic period
costumes perform portions of the spirituals and provide an idea of how the
Jubilees looked and sounded in performance.  The latter day group consists
of five men and five women under the direction of Paul Kwami.  The use of
archival images including photographs, paintings, and broadsides provide
strong visuals to bring the era back to life.  The five guests who provide
insights into the singers and their music are Horace Clarence Boyer,
musicologist; Toni Anderson and Katherine Preston musical historians; and
John Hope Franklin and Reavis L. Mitchell historians. Dion Graham narrates
with a dignity and subtlety that complements the subject very well.  An
encore program containing complete versions of the Jubilee's songs would be
a most welcome supplement.

The history of the Jubilee Singers revolves around the hub of a southern
city beginning with the Civil War.  In February of 1862, Nashville,
Tennessee, Cumberland River port and a railroad and industrial hub of the
south, was the first Confederate city to be captured and occupied by the
Union army.  Soon the city was inundated with thousands of refugee slaves
pouring in from farms and plantations in the country and crowding the
ghetto known as "Smoky Row."  At the end of the Civil War Brevet General
Clinton Bowen Fisk was assigned to the position of assistant commissioner
of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands.  Fisk was charged
with the zeal of the former abolitionist group called the American
Missionary Society (AMA) to educate the illiterate former slaves that
congested Nashville.  Late in 1865 a complex of twenty abandoned Union army
hospital barracks were chosen to house "The Fisk Free Colored School" which
was officially opened in January 1866 and incorporated as Fisk University
in August 1867.

The first song of faith mentioned in Ward's saga is "We are Climbing
Jacob's Ladder" with its repeated refrain "every rung goes higher, higher."
Sung by the students of the Fisk school, it was their anthem of aspiration
to climb out of their enforced state of ignorance and to rise up to be
learned men and women.  Opposition to teaching the former slaves was
pervasive among white southerners in occupied Nashville.  Acts of
terrorism, violence and arson against the Fisk school and the outlying
country schools began soon after they were established and escalated in the
decades to follow.

A key figure in the development of the Jubilee Singers was George Leonard
White.  As a First Sergeant in the Civil War, White had served at
Gettysburg as well as in the campaign to take the Confederate stronghold on
Lookout Mountain in Tennessee.  In 1867 White was given the position of
Treasurer of Fisk.  His true vocation was to be choir master and select
outstanding vocalists from the student population to create what would
become the Jubilee Singers.  White trained his students to sing European
popular vocal pieces but became intrigued by the spirituals which had been
composed in slavery that the young people sang when they were at leisure.
White soon began to include some of these spirituals in their concerts.

A second key figure in the conception of the Singers was Samuella "Ella"
Sheppard.  Born into slavery in 1851, Ella was rocked to sleep by her
mother Sarah singing "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" which the Jubilees would
popularize.  Ella had a very close call when she was about three years old
when her mother learned that their owner was training little Ella to spy on
her.  Disheartened by this betrayal, Sarah elected to drown herself and her
daughter in the Cumberland River to escape their nightmare existence.
According to Ward, Sarah was dissuaded from the murder-suicide by Mammy
Viney who said in part "The Lord has got need of this child" (5).

[It is possible that Samuel Clemens heard the story of Ella Sheppard's
precarious childhood because an uncannily similar circumstance occurs in
his _Pudd'nhead Wilson_ (1894).  In chapter three, Roxy, the woman with
just enough Negro blood to be a slave, decides to drown herself and her
infant son Chambers in the Mississippi River.]

Shortly after her brush with mortality, Ella was purchased out of bondage
by her free father Simon.  Ella was privileged to become a student of an
old black preacher and teacher named Daniel Wadkins.  However, six months
before the Civil War began, Simon Sheppard ran so deeply into debt that
Ella and Simon's second wife could have been confiscated and sold by his
creditors to settle his debt.  Sheppard fled with his family to Cincinnati,
Ohio.  While living in the black quarter known as Ragtown, Ella resumed her
studies and was tutored to develop her soprano voice.  She also mastered
the piano keyboard which prepared her to became an accompanist for the
Singers.

At the end of the war in 1865 Ella, at age fourteen, returned to Nashville
and, after a short stint as a country school teacher, enrolled at Fisk.
She would become White's assistant choir master arranging many of the
spirituals herself.

Ward's volume provides vivid portraits of many of the Jubilee Singers, but
among the twenty-seven vocalists who would emerge over the span of the
Jubilee Singers' seven years on the road in America and Europe only two
others besides Ella Sheppard would participate in all three of their major
tours.  The second was freeborn soprano Jennie Jackson, granddaughter of
Andrew Jackson's personal servant.  Jennie had the darkest complexion in
the group which fascinated white audiences and this, together with her
great beauty and talent, made her a star.

The third singer to appear in all three tours was powerful soprano Maggie
Porter who, as a little girl in Nashville, had sat outside a church
listening to the choirs sing until one day the leader invited her in.
Maggie remembered that the group always sang in "good English" although it
was difficult for them to "shake off the old pronunciations" at first
(115-16).  [This reviewer found that some of the songs in the appendix of
J. B. T. Marsh's _Story of the Jubilee Singers_ (1892) have some
grammatical quirks but only three were actually written in dialect:  "Love
an' Serb de Lord," "Hear de Angels Singin,'" and "Didn't My Lord Deliber
Daniel."]

With Fisk University in financial difficulities, George White conceived of
taking his fledgling group of singers on a tour to raise funds for their
school.  With no support for the venture from AMA, White took the
initiative and the last $40 left in the treasury to finance it.  On October
5, 1871 White departed by rail with nine singers, selecting for their
itinerary towns and cities that had been way stations run by abolitionists
along the route of the former underground railway along which runaway
slaves had fled north before the Civil War.  The group was billed as "The
Colored Students of Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee."

On tour the group faced racial discrimination and had trouble finding
hotels which would accommodate them; their clothes turned to rags and they
were plagued with health problems.  Contralto Mabel Lewis recounted their
predicament in language worthy of Sam Clemens:  "Shall I tell you about the
different times when we were turned out of hotels because God took more
pains with the making of our people than of others?  Is it because He
stopped to paint us and curl our hair that we have to suffer for these
extra attentions that have been bestowed upon us?" (197).  In a recent
C-SPAN2 broadcast promoting his book, Ward told his audience that when he
quoted Mabel's words during an appearance at Fisk, the school's present-day
Jubilees "stood up and cheered."

Their repertoire started off with European popular vocal music and only a
few encores of spirituals.  However, they soon discovered the audiences
responded most strongly to the old slave songs and gradually their emphasis
shifted to the spirituals.

Ward relates how one evening in November in Columbus, Ohio after a prayer
meeting George White, instead of sleeping, prayed for guidance.  In the
morning he announced the new name for the group, "Children, it shall be the
Jubilee Singers" (139).  The name came from the Bible, chapter twenty-five
of Leviticus, which told of the Jewish Year of Jubilee which took place
every fifty years and was celebrated with debt relief and the emancipation
of slaves.

On December 22, 1871 the group performed in Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth
Church.  Afterwards, Beecher opened his purse and encouraged his
congregation to give by stating, "They cannot live on air.  They sing like
nightingales but need more to eat than nightingales" (154).  With Beecher's
support, the group raised $850.  As an additional fund raising inducement,
White announced plans to build Jubilee Hall at Fisk--a building that would
serve as an imperishable stone and brick refuge against southern
vigilantes.

Several weeks later in Hartford, Connecticut the Jubilee Singers sang at
the Asylum Hill Congregational Church and at Allyn Hall providing Samuel
Clemens with his first opportunity to see and hear their performance.  In
Washington, D. C. the Jubilees met President Grant at the White House and
sang "Go down, Moses" for him.  Their concerts sold out and excursion
trains were chartered to bring in out-of-towners.  After they experienced
discrimination from conductors on the railroads George Pullman integrated
his cars for them.

A tour of the British Isles was launched in April 1873.  Queen Victoria was
impressed with these "real negroes" and her approval guaranteed their
popularity.  They presented themselves as refined black Victorians and were
even painted as a group by Victoria's own portrait artist.

On March 10, 1873 Samuel Clemens wrote from Hartford to alert Tom Hood and
George Routledge about the Jublilee's upcoming visit to London.  Although
Ward does not provide his readers with the text of Clemens' letter, a
portion of the recommendation read:

"I was reared in the South, & my father owned slaves, & I do not know when
anything has so moved me as did the plaintive melodies of the Jubilee
Singers.  It was the first time for twenty-five or thirty years that I had
heard such songs, or heard them sung in the genuine old way--it is a way
that white people cannot imitate, . . . for one must have been a slave
himself in order to feel what life and was & so convey it in the music.  Do
not fail to hear the Jubilee Singers"(_Mark Twain's Letters, Volume 5:
1872-1873_, p 315-16).

Clemens' own trip to London coincided with the Jubilee tour and though he
was busy with invitations from other literary men, he made time to see the
singers.  Extracts from his letter to Hood were printed by Hood in his
publication _Fun_ on April 26, 1873.  Clemens proved to be the best advance
man the Jubilees could have ever dreamed of knowing.  When he attempted to
pay for Jubilee concert tickets at the box office, he was spotted by the
theater manager who insisted he take the best seats in the hall free of
charge.

According to Ward, Clemens bought the Singers' songbook _Jubilee Songs As
Sung by the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University_ (1872).  It consisted of
sixty-two pages, sold for twenty-five cents per copy at the concerts and
proved to be another effective fund raiser.  After Livy had returned to the
states while he remained behind to lecture, Clemens would soothe his
homesickness by sitting at pianos in his hotel suites and singing the
Jubilees' songs.

The therapeutic value of singing a slave spiritual is extolled by
musicologist Horace Clarence Boyer whose remarks in the documentary are
also included by Ward in his book:  "It begins to take the frown out of the
face.  The shoulders come back to their natural position . . . you're going
through a cleansing process . . . coming back to where you wanted to be.
Things are not quite as bad as you think they are . . . the more you sing
it, the more you find relief, the more you believe there is a way out of
this" (113).

The Jubilees netted $5,000 from the British tour but returned home to
witness Fisk University suffering from the reversals of Reconstruction in
the south which included the abolition of the Freedmen's Bureau,
segregation codes and the dismissal of Federal troops which had protected
them from the Klan and other vigilantes.  The AMA had drained the Jubilee
Hall fund; that building was still just a hole in the ground.

Erastus Milo Cravath, AMA chief of education missions in the South, sent
the Jubilees out for a third tour--beginning in the eastern United States
from January to October 1875; then to the British Isles from November 1875
to June 1876; Switzerland and Holland from June 1876 to February 1877; then
finally England and Germany from March 1877 to July 1878.  Their exhausting
schedule reached a record of sixty-eight concerts in forty-one towns in
ninety-one days.  While the Jubilees were touring the British Isles,
Jubilee Hall was officially opened on New Years Day 1876.  Ridden hard by
Cravath, they were replaced if they burned out or died.  White's own health
had deteriorated badly; his resignation was accepted several months before
the end of the tour and Ella Sheppard had to shoulder his responsibilities.
After seven years the Jubilees had reached their saturation point and
while returning home they sang together for the last time under the
auspices of Fisk University on board the boat just before arriving in New
York harbor on July 16, 1878.

Ward's book concludes with an account of an August 1897, performance of a
half dozen Jubilee singers in a beer garden in Lucerne, Switzerland.
Clemens was in attendance, grieving on the first anniversary of the death
of his daughter Susy.  In a state of pessimism and despair the singers
helped to revive his spirits.  He wrote:

"Arduous and painstaking cultivation has not diminished or artificialized
their music, but on the contrary--to my surprise--has mightily reinforced
its eloquence and beauty.  Away back in the beginning to my mind--their
music made all other vocal music cheap; and that early notion is emphasized
now.  It is utterly beautiful, to me; and it moves me infinitely more than
any other music can" (407).

Both the book and the documentary pay tribute to the Jubilee Singers'
unique role in bringing a pure folk medium to international attention.
They celebrate the faith and self sacrifice of a people who rose out of
deprivation and into prominence while introducing the beauty and emotional
power of a musical form, born out of bondage, to touch a universal chord in
the heart of humanity.  Andrew Ward chose a worthy cause to champion and
bring to our attention.  Thanks to Ward's book and the companion film
produced and co-written by Llewelyn Smith we are the richer for having this
episode from our heritage fully illuminated for the first time.

Historical footnotes:

Spirituals played a poignant role in the climax of the Clemens' stay at the
Villa di Quarto in Florence, Italy on June 5, 1904.  Clemens' wife Livy had
been dangerously ill but seemed to be rallying. Albert Bigelow Paine's
biography recalls that tragic evening when his daughters Clara and Jean and
their long time family servant Katy Leary were also present:

At 9 PM Clemens "hopeful and happy . . . went to the piano upstairs and
sang the old jubilee songs that Susy had liked to hear him sing . . . Jean
came in to listen.  He sang 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot' and 'My Lord He
Calls Me.'  [Clara Clemens also recalled her father singing 'Go Chain the
Lion Down.']  Livy, hearing the singing from the distant room told Katy
Leary "He is singing a good-night carol to me."  At 9:20 Livy died in
Katy's arms.  (Paine, _Mark Twain: A Biography_, pp. 1217-18.)

_____

About the reviewer:

Dave Thomson has been a Mark Twain aficionado since he read Tom Sawyer at
age 12 in 1958.  That same year he made his first trip to Hannibal, MO and
has been a frequent visitor ever since.  In 1986 he designed the first of a
series of book jackets for the publications of Hannibal historians Hurley
and Roberta Hagood.  Thomson's collection encompasses Mark Twain and the
history of steamboat navigation in the Mississippi valley.  He spent 25
years at the Walt Disney Studio planning the photography of animated
features.  Some of Dave's graphics can be seen on Barbara Schmidt's Mark
Twain Quotes website.  This is his second review for the Mark Twain Forum.