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.
5 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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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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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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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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