Collection
Fisk Jubilee Repertoire
The Fisk Jubilee Singers were founded in 1871 at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee — a school established just six years earlier for freedpeople. Their first touring ensemble was assembled from students, many of them formerly enslaved, to raise desperately needed funds for a university that was nearly broke.
Their performances of spirituals moved audiences to tears across the United States and Europe. They performed for President Ulysses S. Grant, Queen Victoria, and packed concert halls in cities that had never before heard this music performed on a stage. The money they raised built Jubilee Hall — the first permanent building in the American South constructed specifically for the higher education of Black Americans.
J.B.T. Marsh documented the Jubilee Singers' repertoire in The Story of the Jubilee Singers; With Their Songs (1880), one of the earliest published collections of Negro spirituals with musical notation. That documentation established the Fisk repertoire as a scholarly reference point for the tradition, and it remains so today.
The songs in this collection are drawn from primary sources and scholarly collections in the public domain. Browse the full archive to explore spirituals across all four collections.
19 songs in this collection
Deep River
Deep River, My Home Is Over Jordan
One of the most recognized Negro spirituals, expressing a profound longing for deliverance — to cross the Jordan River into the promised land of peace and rest.
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Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel
Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel?; O Daniel; My Lord Delivered Daniel
A spiritual constructed as a question — and a question to which the singer already knows the answer. The Lord delivered Daniel from the lions' den; the Lord delivered Jonah from the belly of the whale; the Lord delivered the Hebrew children from the fiery furnace; and the singer asks, in the same breath, why not me?
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Down by the Riverside
Ain't Gonna Study War No More; Gonna Lay Down My Sword and Shield
A spiritual of laying down burdens and weapons at the water's edge, whose refrain — 'I ain't gonna study war no more' — carried it from the antebellum South into the twentieth century as one of the great anthems of the American peace movement.
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Every Time I Feel the Spirit
Ev'ry Time I Feel the Spirit; Upon the Mountain, My Lord Spoke
A jubilant spiritual of personal encounter with the divine, drawing on the fire and smoke of Mount Sinai and the chill of the Jordan River to testify that prayer answers the movement of the Spirit in the heart.
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Ezekiel Saw the Wheel
Ezekiel Saw de Wheel
A vision-song built on the prophet Ezekiel's wheel within a wheel, transforming apocalyptic scripture into a meditation on faith, judgment, and the promise of a world set right.
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Free at Last
Way Down Yonder in the Graveyard Walk; Free at Last, Free at Last
Three short words that hold the whole tradition's theology of liberation: 'Free at last.' Sung in the antebellum South, recorded by the Fisk Jubilee Quartet in 1909, and lifted by Martin Luther King Jr. into the closing line of his 1963 dream — the song's afterlife is American history itself.
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Get on Board, Little Children
The Gospel Train; The Gospel Train's A-Comin'; Get on Board
A spiritual that casts salvation as an approaching train with room for everyone — and one of the songs most often cited, and most often debated, as coded language for Underground Railroad escape.
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Go Down, Moses
Go Down Moses, Way Down in Egypt Land; Let My People Go
The most explicitly political of the great antebellum spirituals, it casts enslaved Americans as the Israelites of Exodus and demands — not requests — their liberation.
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I Got Shoes
All God's Chillun Got Wings; All God's Children Got Shoes; Going to Shout All Over God's Heav'n
A song that gives the enslaved singer everything the slaveholder denied — shoes, a robe, a crown, wings, a home — and then turns the gift sideways with a single line: 'Everybody talkin' 'bout heaven ain't goin' there.'
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Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho
Joshua Fit de Battle ob Jericho; Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho
A spiritual built on the architecture of a wall coming down — a wall that, in the antebellum South, every singer knew did not need to be in Canaan to be real. The trumpets blow, the children shout, the wall falls; and the song's meaning is not subtle.
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Many Thousand Gone
No More Auction Block for Me; Many Thousand Go
A song that announces the end of slavery in the present tense. The auction block, the driver's lash, the pint of salt — each verse names what is finished, and the refrain counts the dead and the freed in the same breath: 'Many thousand gone.'
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My Lord, What a Morning
My Lord, What a Mourning; Stars Begin to Fall
An apocalyptic spiritual imagining Judgment Day as a moment of terrible awe and quiet triumph, first published in 1867 and later carried into concert halls by Marian Anderson.
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Roll, Jordan, Roll
Roll, Jordan
The first song in the first published collection of African American spirituals — a Sea Islands shout in which the Jordan rolls forward and the singer asks to roll with it, into heaven, into freedom, into the next world this one cannot yet contain.
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Steal Away
Steal Away to Jesus
A song of quiet urgency — the trumpet sounds, the sinner stands, and the soul prepares to depart — understood by many historians as one of the most extensively used coded spirituals of the Underground Railroad era.
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Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
Swing Low
Perhaps the most widely known of all Negro spirituals, it envisions a heavenly chariot descending to carry the singer home — a song of both transcendent hope and, many scholars argue, coded escape.
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There Is a Balm in Gilead
Balm in Gilead; Sometimes I Feel Discouraged
A spiritual of consolation and spiritual healing, drawn from the prophet Jeremiah's lament, that answers the Bible's anguished question with a defiant statement of faith: there is a balm.
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Wade in the Water
Wade in de Water
A song of baptism, of the Spirit moving on the waters — and, according to deep historical tradition, one of the most practically useful of the coded Underground Railroad spirituals, advising escapees to travel through water to evade pursuing hounds.
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We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder
Jacob's Ladder
A call-and-response spiritual built on the biblical vision of Jacob's ladder, in which the enslaved singer climbs 'higher, higher' toward both spiritual perfection and, many scholars argue, freedom itself.
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Were You There
Were You There When They Crucified My Lord; Were You There?
A spiritual that asks its hearer the most direct possible question — 'Were you there?' — and expects no easy answer. The first African American spiritual to be incorporated into the official hymnal of a major Protestant denomination, and one of the few songs of the tradition to enter the worship of churches across the racial line of American Christianity.
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