Concert Spirituals and the Fisk Jubilee Singers

From the students' perspective, singing concert spirituals helps them manage three realms of hegemony during their college experience: 1) the superimposed U.S. racial ideology of inequality that stereotypes black bodies as contested sites, that is, essentialized specimens of athleticism, musicality, and humor; 2) the university administration that proclaims the Singers and their singing as the model of educational and cultural excellence; and 3) the broader system of American higher learning avowing liberal education as self-exploration. Concert spirituals are folk songs transformed into art songs through transcription and arrangement in standard Western notation for soloists or choirs and sung with a bel canto vocal aesthetic with occasional use of straight-tone singing.2 They developed into a genre distinct from the large body of songs emerging from the experiences of enslaved Africans in the U.S. Concert spirituals have been the subject of extensive research in the context of Reconstruction, sacred song traditions, folk and art music debates, race and class politics, and the construction of an American music canon.