445 Fisk Jubilee Singers “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” 1909

“The saga of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers is one of the most remarkable chapters in the annals of African American music. This unassuming chorus from a small southern college was the first performing group to bring black music suitable for the concert stage to an American public that had previously seen the race mostly through the prism of minstrel stereotypes…The great and lasting contribution of the Fisks was the introduction of the spiritual to America’s musical literature” (Tim Brooks, Richard Spottswood, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919, 2004). 

Fisk Jubilee Singers “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”