To Do This, You Must Know How: Music Pedagogy in the Black Gospel Quartet Tradition

To Do This, You Must Know How

American Made Music Series

Advisory Board

DAVID EVANS, GENERAL EDITOR

BARRY JEAN ANCELET

EDWARD A. BERLIN

JOYCE J. BOLDEN

ROB BOWMAN

SUSAN C. COOK

CURTIS ELLISON

WILLIAM FERRIS

JOHN EDWARD HASSE

KIP LORNELL

BILL MALONE

EDDIE S. MEADOWS

MANUEL H. PEÑA

WAYNE D. SHIRLEY

ROBERT WALSER

To Do This, You Must Know How

Music Pedagogy in the Black Gospel Quartet Tradition

Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright © 2013 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2013

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Abbott, Lynn, 1946–

To do this, you must know how : music pedagogy in the black gospel quartet tradition / Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff.

pages cm. — (American made music series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61703-675-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-676-7 (ebook) 1. African Americans—Music—History and criticism. 2. African Americans—Music—Instruction and study. 3. Spirituals (Songs)—Tennessee—Nashville—History and criticism. 4. Gospel music—Alabama—Birmingham—History and criticism. I. Seroff, Doug. II. Title.

ML3556.A23 2013

782.25’4071176—dc23                                             2012016666

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter One

John Work II and the Resurrection of the Negro Spiritual in Nashville

Chapter Two

Time, Harmony, and Articulation: Quartet Training and the Birmingham Gospel Quartet Style

Chapter Three

An Alabama Quartet Expert in Chicagoland

Chapter Four

The Alabama Style and the Birth of Gospel Quartet Singing in New Orleans

Notes

Indexes

Acknowledgments

We started sharing research back in 1980, based on a mutual interest in the African American gospel quartet tradition. Ray Funk was the third member of our original research team. Between the three of us, we located and interviewed hundreds of quartet veterans and spent hundreds of hours reviewing historical black newspapers on microfilm. In the late 1980s Ray put down his quartet work to concentrate on calypso music. Ray’s early quartet research is an essential component of this book, and we are grateful for his camaraderie and support.

To Do This, You Must Know How traces major pathways of quartet music education from the halls of Fisk University to the mining camps of Bessemer, Alabama, and on to Chicago and New Orleans. The significance of pedagogy in the black quartet tradition impressed itself on us early in our research. Primary school voice culture was a recurrent theme in our interviews with older quartet veterans. The fascinating subject of traditional quartet trainers in black communities also captured our attention.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, we addressed some of these themes, individually and collaboratively, in journal articles, record liner notes, monographs, and commemorative booklets. During the 1990s we set aside our quartet research to consider documentation on ragtime, blues, and jazz in minstrelsy and early black vaudeville. This resulted in our two previous book-length collaborations, Out of Sight (2002) and Ragged but Right (2007). The prominence of vocal quartets in the early development and popularization of African American music is clearly documented in both of these books, confirming that quartets were as fundamental to early-twentieth-century black musical culture as were ragtime pianists, blues queens, or brass bands.

Vintage spiritual and gospel quartet recordings have been chronically ignored and even disparaged by many otherwise avid collectors of black vernacular music. A cult of personal taste, characterized by a predilection for primitive and secular recordings, has bled into scholarship. The first two editions of Blues and Gospel Records, published in 1963 and 1969, excluded recordings by the Fisk University Jubilee Quartet and Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet—two of the most influential black religious singing groups of all time—on the notion that they bear little distinctively Negroid content. Not until the 1982 third edition were the Golden Gates admitted; and finally, in the 1997 fourth edition, the ban on Fisk was lifted. We welcome these curative measures, as we readily acknowledge our extensive use of Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard W. Rye’s indispensable discography. We are also grateful for Cedric J. Hayes and Robert Laughton’s Gospel Records 1943–1969.

Among the early spiritual and gospel quartet veterans we interviewed, there was a shared notion of having taken part in something of value and significance—and sometimes a sense of relief that someone had finally shown up to acknowledge it. One old singer offered this greeting: "I knew you were coming. I didn’t know who you would be, but I knew you were coming." These singers accepted us at face value and shared their remarkable stories. We established many lasting relationships with our quartet informants, but in the passing of time, death has claimed the majority of them. While we can no longer thank them in person, we seek to preserve their voices and their memory.

We have been associated with the University Press of Mississippi for ten years now, and wish to extend our appreciation to Editor Craig Gill and his staff for their support. From the outset, we have enjoyed the benefit of a great team of readers in David Evans and Wayne D. Shirley. Their critiques have been challenging and helpful.

We are indebted to good people at several libraries and archives. For thirty years we have benefited from the cooperation and assistance of the John Hope and Aurelia Elizabeth Franklin Library, Fisk University, Nashville. Special thanks to Dr. Jessie Carney Smith and Special Collections librarians Beth Madison Howse and Vanessa Smith.

We have also enjoyed a long, rewarding relationship with the Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans, where curator Bruce Boyd Raeburn has supported our every effort. Through assistant curator Alma Freeman, we were able to join hands with the Microfilm and Interlibrary Loan divisions of Tulane’s Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, where Hayden Battle, Jeannette Hunter, Patricia Windham, and many others have been most accommodating.

When we first visited the Amistad Research Center, also in New Orleans, Florence Borders and Lester Sullivan were there to assist us. Current director Lee Hampton and his staff continue to welcome us there.

At the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, we have enjoyed the highest degree of support, access, and assistance. Thanks especially to Dale Cockrell and Lucinda Cockrell. Doug Seroff’s collection of research, photographs, and ephemera related to black gospel quartets in the state of Tennessee is available for reference at the Center for Popular Music. A catalogue of the collection can be found at popmusic.mtsu.edu.

Wayne Everard, Colin Hamer, and others at the Louisiana Division of the New Orleans Public Library were there for us, as have been members of the staff in the Nashville Room of the Nashville Public Library. At Industrial High School, Birmingham, we were graciously assisted by Librarian Rosemary Thomas. We also received help from Andy Woodworth at the Bordentown Public Library, Burlington County, New Jersey.

Many others have provided help and support over the years, including Joey Brackner, Chris Brown, Joyce Cauthen, Robert Cogswell, Bob Eagle, Kevin Fontenot, J. Mark Gooch, Barbara Holmes, Charlie Horner, James Isenogle, Robert Laughton, Gary LeGallant, Kip Lornell, Dale Milford, Roger Misiewicz, Bruce Nemerov, Kevin Nutt, Robert Pruter, David Sager, Cheryl Thurber, Alex van der Tuuk, and Charles Wolfe.

A variation of chapter 1 of To Do This, You Must Know How appears in the form of liner notes to Archeophone Records’ exemplary reissue of the Fisk University Jubilee Quartet recordings of 1909–1916 (There Breathes a Hope, Archeophone 5050, 2010), which we recommend as an audio companion to this book. An excerpt from chapter 2 was published in Tributaries: Journal of the Alabama Folklife Association 12 (2010), under the title Roots of Birmingham’s Gospel Quartet Training Culture: Spiritual Singing at Industrial High School. A variation of chapter 2 accompanies New Birmingham Quartet Anthology, CaseQuarter 105, scheduled to be released in late 2012, which we also recommend as an essential audio companion to this book.

To Do This, You Must Know How

Introduction

Say Four Come …

Early-twentieth-century African American sacred harmony singing, spiritual and gospel, was, in a sense, shaped by the interaction of two historical impulses. The first was to perpetuate folk music traditions, a cornerstone of black cultural identity; the second was to master standard Western musical and cultural conventions, the formalizing principles behind artistic harmony singing. Engagement between the two impulses was never more synchronized than in the early decades of the twentieth century. Accordingly, a robust community-based quartet training culture came forth to breathe new life into black religious harmony singing.

Without basic instruction, it is not easy to arrange voices in good, close four-part harmony—certain principles must be observed. As an aging quartet veteran once put it: To do this, you must know how.

The history of pedagogy in black singing traditions under conditions of slavery remains out of sight; nevertheless, it is clear that four-part harmony was not suddenly imposed on the songs of slavery at Fisk University in 1871. James Bland’s 1880 plantation melody In the Evening by the Moonlight preserves a nostalgic image of antebellum southerners enchanted by the weird harmonies and arresting syncopations of slave singing. More credible commentary is preserved in Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer’s 1853 travelogue, Homes of the New World, which gathers letters and diary entries from her 1849–51 sojourn in the United States. On southern ventures, Bremer went out of her way to observe slave music and culture, and she concluded that the peculiar songs of the slaves constituted the only original people’s songs which the New World professes.¹

Bremer often heard slaves singing four-part harmony. On May 14, 1850, she described the services at a slave church in Savannah, Georgia: The choir … sang quartettes, as correctly and beautifully as can be imagined.² Eleven days later she heard the Negroes singing in Columbia, South Carolina, and noted: their hymns sung in quartette were glorious…. They had notebooks before them, and seemed to be singing from them; but my friends laughed, doubting they were for actual use.³ In 1851, at a tobacco factory in Richmond, Virginia, Bremer heard the slaves, about a hundred in number, singing at their work … they sung quartettes, choruses and anthems, and that so purely, and in such perfect harmony and with such exquisite feeling, that it was difficult to believe them self taught. But so they were.⁴

The official integration of Negro Spirituals with formal choral music disciplines is a legacy of the Original Fisk University Jubilee Singers. The initial push for music training was inspired by their startling commercial success. It was encouraged by Antonin Dvorák in a highly publicized 1893 newspaper interview in which he discussed his convictions about the potential for development in African American folk music.⁵ The Dvorák Statement was a mandate to American composers to cultivate an artistic interpretation of Negro folk music. It helped to engender pride in the Negro Spiritual, and it mobilized efforts to provide quality music training across a broad spectrum of African American society.

The variety and abundance of black vocal music training available early in the twentieth century suggests a bold socio-cultural experiment. There were countless initiatives, often conceived as personal commitments, conducted on both national and local levels by music educators of both races. Such efforts were duly noted and appreciated in the press and elsewhere; but there is little commentary about the movement as a whole. The common thread was the dissemination of knowledge of vocal music and four-part harmony singing among the African American masses, in order to raise the standard of musical culture. The surge in black religious quartet singing activity that occurred in the South in the 1920s owed much to this vocal music education movement.

This is the story of an outflow of singing instruction that was remodeled and recycled to serve a larger constituency and a rapidly evolving music form. The connection between school-based instruction and community-based training is an underlying theme. Community trainers stressed many of the same principles as the formal voice culture class, embellishing them with innovations discovered over decades of impromptu quartet harmonizing.

By the 1880s recreational quartets had created a stock of slang chords, slides, turns, and harmonic tricks that came to be known as barbershop harmony.⁶ In its original African American setting, the essence of barbershop was an experimental approach to arranging close harmony chords. Nearly all twentieth-century black quartets employed its radical methods. Its styles and conventions overlapped into blues, jazz, and gospel music.

For the most part, black sacred quartets of any given era sang the same basic repertoire. They distinguished themselves by their original arrangements of commonly shared spirituals, hymns, plantation melodies, and gospel songs. They almost never relied on written scores, but worked from prevailing head arrangements that were constantly open to revision. Spontaneous modifications of chord constructions and other elements typically cropped up in rehearsal or in a heightened moment of public performance, and were subsequently adopted as permanent fixtures.

The city of Nashville, Tennessee, birthplace of the Jubilee Singers, was a vibrant center of black music education. For many years, spiritual singing at Fisk University was the special province of Professor John Work II, Fisk’s underappreciated hero of music. Work believed that The Negro ought never be content with the folk songs as they are, but should work for development, which would bring them into a more exalted life.⁷ He was a featured soloist in the Fisk University Mozart Society, as well as a collector of folk songs and an outspoken champion of the Negro Spiritual. He directed and sang tenor for the illustrious Fisk University Jubilee Quartet. In his role as song leader at daily Fisk Chapel exercises, Work inspired a deep appreciation for the racial folk music in the previously ambivalent student body.

The head of Fisk University’s Music Department, Jennie A. Robinson, was no appreciator of African American folk music, but her uncompromising dedication to music instruction prepared a highly capable corps of black southern grammar and high school teachers to impart the training they received at Fisk to the children of the working class and rural peasantry. Inspired by Work and others, black teachers usually framed primary and high school voice instruction in the context of Negro Spirituals. Enthusiastic, adept students passed these lessons along in rehearsing their own community-based quartets.

The opinions of educated musicians and music instructors concerning community-based quartet singing ran the gamut from enlightened enthusiasm to imperious disdain; but this mattered little, because once knowledge had been imparted it took on a life of its own. The fact that proletarian quartet singers without formal music education repeatedly referred to the importance of attack, release, time, harmony, and articulation is clear evidence of the effective dispersal of school music training. The rigorous application of formal disciplines by community-based singing organizations established a design for self-improvement that enabled the perfection of black gospel quartet singing.

In Jefferson County, Alabama, encompassing Birmingham and Bessemer, the rippling effects of music education taught in southern schools and universities were magnified by the emergence of a culture of community-based quartet trainers who translated the spirit and substance of the music education movement for the inhabitants of working-class neighborhoods. These trainers adapted standard musical precepts, traditional folk practices, and popular music conventions to create something new and vital. The presence of capable, willing peer-group mentors facilitated the organization of gospel quartets in Jefferson County during the 1920s and 1930s.

The education push lost its delicate balance and momentum when grassroots musicians, including quartets, gained recognition and commercial success. The Birmingham Jubilee Singers, young black mill workers and miners, arrived in New York City in 1927 with only their quartet singing skills; yet they managed to sustain themselves for two full years, make commercial phonograph records, and appear on Broadway alongside national stage stars.

The methods and practices of community-based quartet pedagogues are best explained in the language of the trainers and the singers they trained. As one veteran Alabama trainer evoked: "Say four come, and they want to start a quartet. And they come to me, and they don’t know nothing. Well, I’ll give them a little song to sing. And then, I would pick out the voices; which I think would make a tenor, which a baritone." Once they were able to frame up a song in four part harmony, the trainer would begin to straighten out their chords, correcting their individual errors and discords: I would straighten them out if I thought something needed straightening out. If the baritone is not making the chord, and the tenor’s not making the chord, I would try to straighten them out.⁸

If one voice was not being sung properly, it was the trainer’s responsibility to halt the proceedings, correct the offender, and give him his part, as the practice was typically described. One thing that differentiated a trainer from the average quartet singer was that a trainer knew and could effectively demonstrate all four voice parts.

These were only the basics of quartet training. Master trainers such as Charles Bridges, Son Dunham, Jimmy Ricks, Eugene Strong, Norman McQueen, and Gilbert Porterfield each had his own concept of musical style and could achieve the desired effects through direction and resolute drilling. These trainers stood for uncompromising standards of excellence, were fully in charge of quartet rehearsals, and knew how to impose discipline. They also taught the formalities of stage decorum. Each possessed a vast repertoire of the good old close harmony songs, and knew special arrangements of gospel songs and spirituals that other groups were not using. The greatest trainers could turn an ordinary local quartet into something better.

The honor and affection that the gospel quartet fraternity bestowed upon master trainers was a cornerstone of this musical culture. However, the concept of community-based quartet trainers was neither universal nor indispensable; quartets also thrived in geographic regions where trainers were practically unheard of. But in the working-class communities of Birmingham and Bessemer, Alabama, a heritage of quartet singing and training remained a staple of black cultural life for generations.

The rapid influx of miners and steel mill workers to Jefferson County from the rural districts set the stage for this musical development. Quartet singing seems to have been particularly well suited to the living conditions in the area’s black working-class settlements. Birmingham’s first black high school, Industrial High, placed an emphasis on spiritual singing and consciously nurtured the vocal music aspirations of not only its own student body but the black community at large, through community sings.

Spiritual singing at Industrial High had a demonstrable impact on the subsequent development of gospel quartet singing in Jefferson County. One student singer, Charles Bridges, earned a national reputation with the Birmingham Jubilee Singers and Famous Blue Jays. Bridges was regarded as the dean of Birmingham/Bessemer-area quartet trainers. Local quartet veterans recognized him as the daddy of the town when it came to music instruction.

Quartet singing in Birmingham and Bessemer entered a new phase with the appearance of the Famous Blue Jay Singers. Their young leader Silas Steele more or less introduced emotionalism into black sacred quartet singing, to which black audiences responded with great enthusiasm. It unleashed a process that ultimately transformed black religious quartet singing. Initially, Jefferson County gospel quartets were able to assimilate emotionalism into their music without diminishing the quality of their harmony.

Conditions that prevailed in Bessemer were not similar to those in Chicago or New Orleans, but Bessemer’s musical values nevertheless influenced the early development of gospel quartet singing in both of those great cities, through the authority of Alabama-bred trainers who migrated to those locations. Chicago was a capital of black entertainment commerce; by comparison, tiny Bessemer was a cultural backwater. Nevertheless, when Norman McQueen emigrated to the northern metropolis in the mid-1920s, his Bessemer quartet singing experience—ten years with the Foster Singers—elicited real respect; he was soon designated Chicago’s quartet expert.

By the time of McQueen’s arrival, Chicago had an illustrious history as a center for church and community choirs, glee clubs, and choruses, but not quartets. University-trained music instructors had reached out to the city’s rapidly expanding black workers’ community, but when McQueen introduced his version of Alabama quartet training culture through the Chicago Progressive Quartet Association, he quickly attracted one hundred new singing groups into his circle.

However, McQueen’s preeminence was short-lived. His attempt to make Chicago a quartet town was undone by the meteoric ascent of Thomas A. Dorsey’s Gospel Chorus Union, whose progressive and businesslike orientation consigned McQueen’s enterprises to strictly local precincts. Undeterred, McQueen continued to coach and promote local gospel quartets in Chicago into the 1950s.

Alabama-style quartet harmonizing and training culture also took root in the famously musical city of New Orleans. As in Chicago, the ingress of a Bessemer-bred trainer touched off an outbreak of quartet fever, which had a more lasting affect than in Chicago. In New Orleans a history of both school-trained quartet singing and street-corner barbershop harmonizing preceded the Alabama invasion. New Orleans’s musical organizations had previously enjoyed the trickle-down legacy of southern university music education and were under the influence of the Fisk ideal.

When the Alabama style arrived in New Orleans in the early 1930s, it rounded out the musical mix and ushered the local quartet singing groups into the gospel era. Gilbert Porterfield and Sandy Newell, messengers of the new style in New Orleans, adeptly translated the technicalities of good close harmony into the vernacular for factory hands, dockworkers, and housemaids. Porterfield’s instruction was considered the gold standard regarding the perfection of the close harmony blend in New Orleans.

But after the arrival of the Loving Four of Omaha, Nebraska, shortly before World War II, the elevation of evangelistic spirit in quartet performance shifted the focus away from perfection of harmony in New Orleans. The rise of emotionalism presaged the gradual dissolution of a cappella gospel quartet singing in New Orleans, just as it did elsewhere.

In Bessemer at least, old-time quartet singers soldiered on through to the end of the twentieth century, and a few have survived beyond that dividing line. But, the great community-based trainers have all gone to their final reward. Everything has an end. Fortified with records, documents, and interviews, we begin to look back on the history of this remarkable American musical tradition.

Chapter One

John Work II and the Resurrection of the Negro Spiritual in Nashville

The world needs to know that love is stronger than hatred.

—John Wesley Work II

The treasury of African American folk song known as the spirituals arose anonymously from slave cabins and brush arbors and was initially perpetuated as an oral tradition. The Original Fisk Jubilee Singers of Nashville, Tennessee, were first to demonstrate the usefulness of the spirituals, the genuine jewels we brought from our bondage, after Emancipation.¹ Their singing tours of 1871 to 1875 provided the funds necessary to sustain Fisk University and to build Jubilee Hall, the first permanent structure erected in the South for the purpose of black higher education. These events established a foundational relationship between spiritual singing and black education.

Great spiritual singing is characterized by fervent emotive energy subjected to exacting artistic control. Legend has it that George L. White, director of the Original Fisk Jubilee Singers, used to tell the singers to put into the tone the intensity that they would give to the most forcible one that they could sing, and yet to make it as soft as they possibly could. ‘If a tiger should step behind you, you would not hear the fall of his foot, yet all the strength of the tiger should be in that tread’ was one of his illustrations of this idea.² Evenly blended harmonization is another essential quality—each part distinctly expressed, but with no single voice predominating. As celebrated Fisk Jubilee Singer Frederick Loudin explained, The object aimed at is to make the voices blend into one grand whole—one beautiful volume.³ By adhering to these disciplines, striking harmonic effects were achieved, along with sensitive interpretations of the underlying sacred and cultural messages of the spirituals.

Jubilee Hall, Fisk University. (courtesy Franklin Library Special Collections, Fisk University)

By the end of the nineteenth century, male quartets were beginning to replace mixed-voice choruses as the most popular medium for public performance of Negro Spirituals. The jubilee or spiritual quartet phenomenon predates the advent of gospel quartet singing by at least two decades; but in spite of significant stylistic differences, spiritual quartets and gospel quartets represent overlapping, inextricably linked movements in the evolution of African American religious vocal harmony. The methods and principles of spiritual quartet singing directly informed and prepared the way for the emergence of gospel quartets. An abiding respect for music training and education survived the transition. The vigorous application of the formal disciplines of harmony singing at the grassroots level established a design for self-improvement, reinvigorating vernacular quartet singing in much the same way as the perfection of barbershop methodology had done a generation earlier.

John Work II: Fisk University’s Hero of Music

John Wesley Work II was an effective agent of the transition from spiritual to gospel quartet singing. For twenty-five formative years, spiritual singing at Fisk University was Work’s special province. He organized and sang tenor for the illustrious Fisk Jubilee Quartet. He also collected and published Negro folk songs and trained numerous student choirs and glee clubs. Moreover, he exerted extraordinary influence as song leader at the daily exercises in Fisk Chapel, inspiring a new pride in the racial heritage of spiritual singing among the student body.

John Wesley Work II was born in Nashville on August 6, 1873, to John and Samuella Work.⁴ His father, John Work I was born in slavery in 1848, in Kentucky, where he was originally known as Little Johnny Gray; but after being sold to the Work family of Nashville, he adopted the name John Wesley Work.⁵ As a teenager Work I was sent in service to New Orleans, where he learned to read and write and became fluent in French.⁶ He reportedly attended rehearsals at the French Opera House, and by coming there in close contact with theatrical life learned much of harmony, [and] developed a beautiful voice.⁷

John Wesley Work II. (courtesy Franklin Library Special Collections, Fisk University)

In 1870, Work I returned to Nashville and married Samuella Boyd.⁸ He taught Sunday school at a mission of the white First Baptist Church, which eventually became an independent African American church. Granddaughter Helen Work maintained that Work I organized the first choir at this historic church, and that three of its members—Maggie Porter, Georgia Gordon, and Minnie Tate—later sang with the Original Fisk Jubilee Singers.⁹

John Work II was a quartet singer from his early boyhood days until shortly before his death in 1925. His grammar school teacher and lifelong friend Minnie Lou Crosthwaite testified:

As a boy he entered the public schools of Nashville at the time the Board of Education was trying the experiment of placing colored teachers in the colored schools, and Dr. R. S. White, now the honored principal of Knowles School, first laid his hands on John Wesley Work in the educational world. There were two other teachers in this school—now known as Dr. and Mrs. S. W. Crosthwaite. In turn, both of them taught the boy. All of us were afterward transferred to Belleview School, and it was there I became certain of the possibilities that lay in his voice. We had a juvenile quartet consisting of John Work, Alex Rogers, Charles Pugsley, and Alfred Winston. Hundreds of parents and children enjoyed their youthful singing, and later, our friend John delighted the patrons and pupils of Meigs High School with the voice that had steadily grown in power and sweetness of tone.¹⁰

Work’s youth quartet illuminates black Nashville’s outsized contribution to turn-of-the-century American popular entertainment. Charles Pugsley and his brother Richmond later organized the Tennessee Warblers, a pioneering company of itinerant singers, musicians, and entertainers.¹¹ Alex Rogers achieved show-business fame as a lyricist for Bert Williams and George Walker’s great musical comedies.¹²

Work’s long participation in the quartet tradition conferred a deep understanding of the joy of harmonizing that was fixed in black southern culture. He recognized that innovations in recreational quartet singing, particularly improvisational close chord constructions—barbershop harmony—were in keeping with the idea of development of the spirituals, and not a corrupting influence or a passing phenomenon.¹³

Work graduated valedictorian from Meigs High School. In the fall of 1891 he entered Fisk University and became wholly absorbed in its activities and traditions. He served as captain of the varsity baseball team, associate editor of the Fisk Herald, and a standout member of every choral club on campus. At graduation he was named class poet.¹⁴ He later composed the Fisk University anthem The Gold and Blue, which is still sung with enthusiasm in Fisk Chapel today.

The Fisk Jubilee Club, ca. 1893. Ella Sheppard Moore and Georgia Gordon Taylor are seated at the far left on the front row. John Work is in the middle row, third from right. Agnes Haynes is in the back row, center. (courtesy Franklin Library Special Collections, Fisk University)

Before Work arrived on campus, Fisk’s most prominent musical organization was the Mozart Society. The University had severed its connections with the Original Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1878, and the spirituals played no great part in the day-to-day life of the students. A significant portion of educated black society viewed the spirituals as an embarrassing vestige of slavery. Abuse of the sacred folk repertoire by minstrel companies of both races had aggravated this feeling. Work reflected:

That Fisk University can truthfully be said in large part to be a product of these plantation melodies is nothing against the fact that just after emancipation the Negro refused to sing his own music in public, especially in the schools …

This is due to the fact that these students have the idea (which is often correct) that white people are looking for amusement in their singing. Some Negroes enjoy being laughed at, but they are not found in the schools. The same students assume the attitude that the rest of the world concedes to the Negroes the ability to execute well their own music, but it is beyond them to understand and execute the classics, and any attempt to do this is presumptuous. To them, this is another form of circumscription which has been a hindrance and handicap.¹⁵

Throughout the 1880s, Fisk’s white principal Adam K. Spence steadfastly led a jubilee song at the daily chapel exercises, undeterred when the students would ‘join in’ with a chorus of cold silence.¹⁶ Spence was often obliged to argue with and sometimes scold and drive, or perhaps plead with the young people before the singing would be such as he thought it ought to be.¹⁷ Work expressed with characteristic humility that Spence from the very first saw the real worth of these songs. He resurrected them for the religious worship in Fisk University, and it was he alone who taught the later generation of students to love and respect them.¹⁸ Work succeeded Spence in leading the daily chapel exercises, and it was Work who ultimately managed to inspire the student body and change the way the spirituals were sung at Fisk.

Adam K. Spence, Fisk University News, October 1911. (courtesy Franklin Library Special Collections, Fisk University)

The first hint of a revival of jubilee singing at Fisk was signaled in 1886, when alumnus Rev. George W. Moore, pastor of Lincoln Memorial Church in Washington, D.C., and husband of Original Fisk Jubilee Singer Ella Sheppard Moore, wrote an open letter to the Fisk Herald, calling for the resurrection of an itinerant company of jubilee singers: The question has repeatedly presented itself: Why cannot Fisk University again utilize this power of Song, which has such a tenacious hold on the hearts of the people, to sing up an endowment fund as the walls of Jubilee Hall went up? It has young talent in the school and the Mozart Society that could be consecrated to cross this Jordan.¹⁹

The Fisk Jubilee Singers of 1890–91. Basso Thomas W. Talley is on the extreme right. (courtesy Franklin Library Special Collections, Fisk University)

Jubilee Day, commemorating the going out of the Original Fisk Jubilee Singers on October 6, 1871, has been an official holiday at Fisk since 1874. The Jubilee Day celebration of 1890 "was marked as one of exceptional interest because the music was furnished by the new Jubilee Singers and because of the presence of Mrs. Ella Shepard [sic] Moore: The demand for the formation of a new troupe of Jubilee Singers arises from the decision of the officers of the American Missionary Association of New York, to lay the foundation of a new theological seminary … which should have as its object the training of young men for the colored Congregational churches. Rev. Chas. Shelton, Indian Secretary for the A. M. A., has been appointed financial agent for Fisk University and … will leave with the troupe, Oct. 16."²⁰

The new troupe of Fisk Jubilee Singers was comprised of students drawn, as Rev. Moore had recommended, from the Mozart Society. Ella Sheppard Moore was director; Thomas W. Talley, bass; J. W. Holloway and P. L. La Cour, tenors; Lincolnia Haynes, soprano; Alice Vassar, alto; Fannie E. Snow and Antoinette Crump.²¹ They made their debut at Birmingham, Connecticut, and then traveled to North Hampton, Massachusetts, to attend the annual meeting of the American Missionary Association. Later, in New York City they sang Let Your Light Shine All Over the World for the Sunday school of Broadway Tabernacle and lifted a collection of $500. That same evening they made an appearance at Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn: When we went into the audience room a multitude of 4000 I think awaited us. The house was packed to the uttermost.²²

On May 27, 1891, the new Jubilee Singers entered the Fisk University dining hall after an eight month tour of the north. They have visited the principal cities and churches of New England and have done some work in Canada. Mgr. Shelton reports the work to have been highly helpful to the interests of the University…. The singers not only sang in the churches but in the homes and sick rooms.²³ For the first time since 1878, Fisk University had sent out an officially-sanctioned troupe of itinerant Jubilee Singers, but it would not do so again for another seven years.

After completing his undergraduate studies at Fisk in 1895, John Work taught school in rural Tennessee. In 1897 he entered Harvard University to study Latin. One year later he returned to Fisk, and took a Master of Arts degree in 1898. He taught history and worked in the library during the 1897–1898 school term and began teaching Latin the following year.²⁴

No sooner had Work returned to Fisk than he became head of the movement to restore the Jubilee Song.²⁵ In the spring of 1898 he submitted a position paper to the Fisk Herald, titled Jubilee Music:

Taunts prompted the expression of my convictions, for it has been goading to hear the slight remarks made about Jubilee Music; and to notice the almost avowed contempt which even the intelligent among us have for these melodies.

It may seem at first thought that the reason for this is, that the rising generations want to get away from every vestige of slavery; because most of our evils are due to our previous condition. They imagine no doubt, that such songs are below us, and it is pure condescension and a compromise of dignity to let the world know that we appreciate them. But, what the best critics have pronounced excellent, and the world has approved and wept over, let us not despise.

It is neither condescension nor a compromise of dignity to love such songs, which have done more to place us favorably before the world than all else we ever had, notwithstanding that thirty-years unexcelled progress of which we are justly proud. The greatest triumph wrought by any Negroes, was made by that band of singers who left home, friends and all, suffering almost unspeakable indignities, but who finally, through these melodies gained admittance to monarchs and dignitaries, won the admiration of the world, and made possible our own Alma Mater …

There is, no doubt, in this music some power that appeals to the very souls of men. Some may be pleased to advance the argument that people enjoy these songs because they are minstrel-like. We must admit that this music is rough and unpolished, but its theme is most sublime, in this respect, even rivaling The Messiah; its theme is God and Heaven. Then again, we never see audiences weeping at minstrel shows. True it is that some of the songs evoke a smile, but under it all is a strain of seriousness and religion. To those who have not found that peculiar strength and beauty, I would venture this unasked advice. Spend as much time in studying, as you do in finding fault with them …

The hungry souls of men are calling for the common melody that hearts enjoy and the numerous companies that are masquerading under the title of Original Jubilee Singers, attest to the fact that they still hold sway over men, and that they are useful as well as beautiful.²⁶

Work found a kindred spirit and a true helpmate in Agnes Morris Haynes. They were married in Fisk Memorial Chapel on April 26, 1899.²⁷ Originally from Staunton, Virginia, Haynes had received her vocal training in the Fisk Music Department and sung solos with the Mozart Society and the Jubilee Club. She briefly taught music at a Colored normal school in Albany, Georgia, where she was deemed a valuable adjunct to our community. Many good voices are being made by her training.²⁸

In 1895 Haynes and a quintet organized by Adam K. Spence represented Fisk at the annual meeting of the American Missionary Association in Detroit.²⁹ This began a tradition of appearances by Fisk singing groups at A. M. A. anniversaries. The following year Haynes traveled to Boston with a double quartet from the University, to entertain at another A. M. A. convention. The octet also appeared at Boston’s Park Street Church, Faneuil Hall, and Tremont Temple.³⁰ At a Complimentary Concert to the Governor and Legislature of Tennessee given in Fisk Memorial Chapel on March 19, 1897, Haynes sang her best-known solo, I’ll Hear That Trumpet Sound In That Morning.³¹

Frederick J. Loudin, a veteran of the Original Fisk Jubilee Singers, and since 1882, director of his own independent company of Jubilee Singers, kept a watchful eye on musical developments at Fisk. At commencement exercises in 1894 he recruited two female singers to fill vacancies in his troupe. After Fisk commencement in 1897, Loudin drew out two more students for service with his company, one of whom was Agnes Haynes.

Haynes sailed for Great Britain with Loudin’s Fisk Jubilee Singers on a tour that began in September 1897. Apparently, she was still with them on January 24, 1898, when they sang John Brown’s Body in Hull, England, on the spot where William Wilberforce, the great emancipator, was born.³² By September, however, she had returned to Nashville to begin her new job as Assistant in Vocal Music and Jubilee Singing in the Fisk University Music Department.³³

The Paradox of Jennie A. Robinson

The head of the Fisk Music Department was Jennie Asenath Robinson, a white woman with a passion for classical music and Negro education, but without the slightest interest in African American folk music. Robinson was known for her commitment to simplicity of style, having as its object the expression of the real thought and feeling of the music free from affectation and unnatural effect.³⁴ Simplicity of style had long been a distinguishing characteristic of vocal music at Fisk University, dating back to the first director of the Jubilee Singers, George L. White. But a conflict of principles between Robinson and John Work would create tension on Fisk campus and blight Work’s academic career.

Jennie A. Robinson was born August 15, 1857, in Topeka, Kansas, into a staunch abolitionist family:

To do their part toward making Kansas a Free State, her parents journeyed there soon after their marriage. On all sides, Miss Robinson’s relatives were friends of freedom. Her grandfather, Rev. Paul Shepherd, maintained a well-patronized station on the famous Underground Railroad. He too went to Kansas to help make it free, returning to his Michigan home when that object had been attained.

Miss Robinson was heir to all this background of service for the colored people, just as they are heirs of her unselfish life.³⁵

Robinson earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Highland College in 1875 and entered the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1882. After graduating in 1887 she took her position at Fisk. The Fisk Music Department was still in an embryonic state when she arrived. Determined to see Fisk’s course in music achieve full college-level accreditation, she began drawing around her a group of teachers from Oberlin who shared her own views.³⁶ Fisk President Erastus Milo Cravath underlined the administration’s support of her goal: that Fisk should establish a great school of music, in which the genius of the Negro for music should be fully developed.³⁷

Outside of Robinson’s classroom, choral music of many sorts thrived on the Fisk campus. Original Jubilee Singer Ella Sheppard Moore established and trained a student Jubilee Club. John Work organized a Glee Club composed of the best male voices in the school. Their selections … vary in style from the sweet old favorites, such as ‘Swanee River’ and ‘Nellie Was A Lady’ to the rollicking, jolly, college songs of the day…. The entire number of the club is fifteen.³⁸

Jennie Asenath Robinson. (courtesy Franklin Library Special Collections, Fisk University)

This mixed quartet sang at the American Missionary Association Conference, Concord, New Hampshire, October 1898. Agnes Haynes and John Work are standing. Seated left to right: Albert Greenlaw, Mabel Grant, Rev. George W. Moore (the troupe’s escort). (courtesy Franklin Library Special Collections, Fisk University)

In October 1898 Fisk sent a mixed-voice quartet of jubilee singers to Concord, New Hampshire, for the annual meeting of the A. M. A.³⁹ The members were Agnes Haynes, alto; Mabel Grant, soprano; John Work, tenor; and Albert G. Greenlaw, bass. Originally from Woodstock, Ontario, Canada, Greenlaw had come to Fisk in 1896. His melodious basso was nurtured under Jennie A. Robinson’s training, and his solos at Fisk musicales attracted enthusiastic critiques.⁴⁰ A glowing review of the Concord engagement remarked on the beneficial effects of thorough training on the quartet’s rendering of Negro folk songs:

The Jubilee Singers sang right into the hearts of their audience every time they appeared. Never in the first days when the Fisk Singers attracted so much attention did their voices carry a more plaintive refrain nor thrill more sympathetic listeners than did the folk songs of these young people. They reproduced the peculiar characteristics of Negro melodies while their more thorough training made the impression of their music deeper and more satisfactory. For their success they are greatly indebted to Mrs. Geo. W. Moore [Ella Sheppard Moore], one of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers.⁴¹

The Roots of Black Music Pedagogy

Nashville was the hub of a national initiative for the advancement of African American music instruction, which had its roots in post-Civil War efforts to fit the freedmen for self-sufficiency through formal education. The push for music training was initially inspired by the startling commercial success of the Original Fisk Jubilee Singers, and encouraged by Czech composer Antonin Dvorák’s highly publicized statement concerning the potential for artistic development in African American folk music and lore. By the end of the nineteenth century a multi-faceted movement committed to fostering black music education had gained momentum, built upon the efforts of composers, concert artists, and educators, especially in the South.

The local black weekly Nashville Globe pointed out in 1909 that, The talent, especially musical and vocal, possessed by the young men and women of Nashville, is sought after by some of the best educational institutions in the country. It is known that the majority of the young people who pursue and finish their musical training are immediately employed … and that they are pursuing their chosen profession in some distant state.⁴²

By the time this appraisal appeared, Fisk’s music department had placed instructors and department heads at black universities across the nation.⁴³ John Work’s older sister Jennie D. Ballentyne headed the music department at Selma University in Alabama, and later Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona, Florida. The music department at Tuskegee Institute was headed by Jennie Cheatham Lee, assisted by instructors Miranda Winter and Alice Simmons; all Fisk graduates taught by Jennie Robinson. Tuskegee, like Fisk, prepared many teachers for southern rural grammar and high schools, and sent music education rippling through African American communities in Alabama and elsewhere in the South.

Jennie A. Robinson was a fountainhead of black southern music education. During her long tenure all aspiring teachers educated at Fisk were required to attend vocal music classes, read music readily, and be able to teach the elements of music … and all are required to pass a thorough examination before being excused from this class.⁴⁴ Consequently, Fisk University sent out hundreds of grammar and high school teachers who were carefully trained music and voice instructors, passing along the training and precepts learned at Fisk to the children of the southern black urban working class and rural peasantry.⁴⁵

Inspired by John Work, Fisk-trained teachers routinely