AN AMERICAN MUSICIAN
In early 1850s Nashville, Ella Sheppard’s free father Simon purchased the little girl from her mother’s owner for $350 (about three years earnings for a white farm-laborer then). Ella's mother, however, was sold to a Mississippi plantation. After an 1856 riot by whites against free blacks in the town's "Black Bottom" riverfront ward, Simon abandoned his livery stable and with his daughter moved to Cincinnati where he restarted his business. He was successful enough to send Ella to school, buy a piano, and pay a German immigrant to give her lessons.
Simon died of cholera in 1866, leaving 15-year old Ella to support her stepmother and half-sister by giving piano lessons in Cincinnati. She enrolled at the Fisk Free Colored School in 1868, giving piano lessons in Nashville to pay her school-fees, as well as to support her family.
Fisk treasurer (and choir director) George White offered her the piano-teaching post at Fisk; she became the first black member of the faculty (and the only black instructor for seven more years). In 1871, White began taking the choir on tour to raise funds for a new and larger facility. Ella became assistant music director in addition to being accompanist, a new position that she held for ten years.
Early in their first tour, the Singers concluded the mostly-white audiences preferred their versions of “negro spirituals,” rather than the classical material they initially performed. Ella was tasked with finding and arranging more of these pieces, making folk melodies and impromptu verses common on Southern plantations into polished concert numbers. Her efforts and sensibilities largely created the catalog of spirituals which continues to be heard a hundred and fifty years later.
The original group of Singers stopped touring in 1878. Sheppard continued to teach at Fisk until she married George Moore in 1882; they moved to Washington, D.C. where Moore was a leader in the American Missionary Association, and a professor at Howard University. The couple were active in the local temperance movement, and were close friends of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. Ten years later, they returned to Nashville, where Ella regularly assisted the choir, researched and arranged songs, and wrote articles on African-American and women's issues.

Fisk Jubilee Singers recorded in 1909:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUvBGZnL9rE