"There Breathes a Hope: The Legacy of John Work II and His Fisk Jubilee Quartet, 1909-1916" at Archeophone Records

Lovely Sounds of Sorrow
Listening to the Fisk Jubilee Quartet a century later

By TERRY TEACHOUT
December 24, 2010
The Wall Street Journal

Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree. Rarely, though, have I been so engrossed by an album remastered from antique 78s as I was by "There Breathes a Hope: The Legacy of John Work II and His Fisk Jubilee Quartet, 1909-1916," an anthology released by Archeophone Records. This two-CD set, which also includes a profusely illustrated 100-page booklet, contains 43 of the first recordings of black spirituals. It is the most important historical reissue of 2010—and one that tells a story about turn-of-the-century black culture that may make some listeners squirm with retrospective discomfort.

Nashville's Fisk University, which opened its doors in 1866, is one of America's oldest historically black colleges. It is also known to scholars of American music as the home of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, an ensemble founded in 1871 that introduced concertgoers around the world to such deathless songs of sorrow and hope as "There Is a Balm in Gilead" and "Roll Jordan Roll," in the process raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for the inadequately funded school. The original Fisk Jubilee Singers disbanded before the invention of the phonograph, but in 1899 John Work II, a teacher at Fisk, reorganized the group, and a male quartet drawn from the chorus started making recordings for Victor Talking Machine Co. in 1909.

No matter how much you think you know about spirituals, I think you'll be surprised to hear these performances, because few of them sound anything like what you're likely to be expecting. Their musical tone is formal, sometimes even a bit staid, as if you were hearing four gentlemen in high-button shoes warbling close-harmony hymns in the parlor. Not always—the quartet tosses off the syncopations in the up-tempo tunes with a light, dancing touch—but it's downright startling to hear them sing "CHAH-ree-AHT" in the very first recording of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." No less surprising is that they recorded "Old Black Joe," one of Stephen Foster's nostalgic plantation songs, at their third session.

The only performance on "There Breathes a Hope" that hints at the existence of a very different kind of black music is the 1911 recording of "Po' Mo'ner Got a Home at Last." In place of smooth four-part harmony, we hear heavy, rough-edged unison singing with a keening falsetto countermelody on top. It's a radical departure from the group's usual style—and one that would not soon be repeated.

How to explain the near-Victorian tone of these recordings? The answer, of course, is that the members of the quartet were university men, aspiring members of the middle class who believed as devoutly in the tenets of the genteel tradition as their white counterparts. Indeed, the mere fact that they were singing spirituals (instead of, say, part-songs by Brahms) was enough to make some of their fellow students look askance at them. In 1909 spirituals were still widely viewed in the black community—and in Fisk's own all-classical music department—as quaint relics of the bad old days of slavery. Small wonder, then, that the Fisk Jubilee Quartet's singing is polished and dignified in a way that now seems as "wrong" to us as the bluesy heterophony of "Po' Mo'ner Got a Home at Last" must have sounded to more than a few of the middle-class blacks who purchased a copy of Victor 16843.

Does that make these records "inauthentic"? Far from it. "There Breathes a Hope" also includes a 1983 interview with Jerome I. Wright, one of the last surviving members of the Jubilee Quartet, who explained that the group "interpreted [spirituals] as the slaves did….Of course, these other [later] groups—with no reflection on their efforts—they would mix up a little jazz with it…we were closer to slavery and we got a deeper, an in-depth feeling of that music."

All of which is just another way of saying that black culture in turn-of-the-century America was vastly more complex than it looks from a distance, and that the middle-class black musical styles of the period were as "authentic" in their own way as the dance-based working-class music that today's listeners treasure. No matter what style you favor, though, I guarantee that you'll be moved to the marrow of your bones by the precise, tautly controlled intensity with which Prof. Work and his group sing "Steal Away to Jesus." As any true music lover can tell you, there's more than one kind of soul.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other Friday. He is the author of "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong." Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

~ Becky in Tucson