Description:The Jubilee Singers, The Ex-Slave Singers of Fisk University, At Birmingham Town Hall,February 26th and March 3rd, 1874.
Founded in Nashville in 1866, Fisk University was one of a number of educational institutions opened in the American South to provide education to former slaves. A few years after its founding, the university was facing financial hardship and a group of singers was formed which undertook a national and international fundraising tour. The Fisk Jubilee Singers, whose performances consisted of black spirituals, made two tours of Britain during the 1870s. The advertisement above refers to their first tour during which they performed at Birmingham Town Hall.
The Fisk singers received the support of a number of middle and upper class patrons who were committed to the antislavery cause and performed before Prime Minister Gladstone and Queen Victoria by whom they were well received Seroff 1986.) Whilst the group received many enthusiastic reviews in the national press, praising their talent, other local newspapers were less complimentary and viewed them as another minstrel act whose melodies were referred to as "exceedingly primitive" and "childishly simple" (Birmingham Daily Mail 10/4/1874.) Such reviews are revealing of popular stereotypes and attitudes towards black people at the time.
Nevertheless, the work of the Fisk singers represented an opening up of the musical landscape by black people as forms such as the black American 'spiritual' were brought to the attention of a world audience. It was musicians such as these who began to challenge the misrepresentation of black people who had been stereotyped and degraded by the blackface minstrel form:
"…nobody who hears the band of coloured vocalists now performing in England under the title 'The Jubilee Singers,' will be likely to accept the songs or the singing of imitation negro minstrels as at all a faithful representation of the reality." (The Christian Family 1873 cited in Seroff 1986:48.)