A fascinating piece of African-American history from the Reconstruction era, Jubliee Singers employs period photographs, recreated scenes, footage of current singers, and commentary from musicologists and historians, to tell the story of the first Jubilee Singers. Desperately trying to keep his fledgling Fisk University (a school for freed slaves opened in Nashville, Tennessee in 1866) from bankruptcy, George Leonard White hit on the idea in 1871 of touring the North to raise funds with a nine-member chorus of black student singers whom he named the Jubilee Singers. At first, they made little money or headway, singing European classics and popular songs. But for an encore they sang a few old-fashioned "cabin songs" or "spirituals" from slave times. White finally realized that the audiences responded best to these emotional, gorgeous tunes--"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," "Steal Away," "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?" --and he began to feature them in the main performance. After a seminal show for a national convention of ministers at Oberlin College in Ohio, the singers sang to a packed church at a Christmas-time event in Brooklyn's Plymouth Church, invited there by the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. The rest of the documentary covers their triumphant, exhilarating, exhausting tours, which ended in Germany in 1877. Although they raised money to save the school, the singers gradually fell apart, both mentally and physically, under the demands of a heavy schedule and greedy administrators, and in-house bickering (it all sounds eerily similar to what happens to modern rock groups today). An extraordinary documentary about an extraordinary time, Jubilee Singers is highly recommended. Editor's Choice. Aud: H, C, P. (M. Pendergrast)
Jubilee Singers: Sacrifice and Glory
(2000) 60 min. $19.98 ($49.95 w/PPR). PBS Video. Color cover. Closed captioned. ISBN: 0-7806-3143-9. Vol. 16, Issue 1
Jubilee Singers: Sacrifice and Glory
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