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ABSTRACT
This article examines the rhetoric of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the famous nineteenth-century choir whose domestic and international performances saved Fisk University from financial ruin, legitimized African American spirituals as high art, and offered a powerful argument for Black American citizenship during the post-Reconstruction era. While scholars have examined reactions to the choir's performances in the nineteenthcentury press, none have studied the organization's own discourse for insights into how the choir's white leaders positioned and promoted the troupe. In this essay, I recover their discourse by examining 35 extant concert programs that accompanied the Singers’ performances between 1871 and 1878. I argue that they work through a rhetorical move that I have termed paradoxical polysemy, a type of polysemy that emerges in contexts beset by ambivalence and navigates multiple, contradictory beliefs within a singular audience. Deploying appeals to the choir's “natural” musical talent that worked in two different registers, the programs negotiated white allies’ inconsistent beliefs about race, appealing both to their desire to help Black people and their wish to maintain white supremacy. Additionally, these dual appeals to the “natural” worked to help the Singers argue for the political and social inclusion of all Black Americans, regardless of their level of education.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Karrin Vasby Anderson and two anonymous reviewers for their careful engagement with this article and excellent feedback. Thanks also to Jennifer Keohane, who gave insightful critique and helpful suggestions on early drafts of the essay.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 I have been unable to find a credible source to estimate the value of the money that the Singers raised in today's currency. However, an online calculator from The U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, which allows researchers to estimate historical prices from 1913 to the present, gives us an idea. The calculator estimates that $150,000, in 1913, would be worth over $4,300,000 in today's dollars. “CPI Inflation Calculator,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, accessed March 23, 2022, https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm.
2 Andrew Ward, Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), 1.
3 See, for example, Gabriel Milner, “The Tenor of Belonging: The Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Popular Cultures of Postbellum Citizenship,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15, (2016): 399-417. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781415000560.; Kira Thurman, “Singing the Civilizing Mission in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms: The Fisk Jubilee Singers in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Journal of World History 27, no. 3 (2016) 443-471. The two seminal histories of the choir are Andrew Ward, Dark Midnight When I Rise and Toni Anderson, Tell Them We Are Singing for Jesus (Mercer, GA: Mercer University Press, 2010).
4 Brian Roberts, Blackface Nation: Race, Reform, and Identity in American Popular Music, 1812–1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 269.
5 This essay joins Paul Stob's effort to correct assumptions about the allegedly accommodationist rhetoric of Black activists during the Reconstruction Era. See Paul Stob, “Black Hands Push Back: Reconsidering the Rhetoric of Booker T. Washington,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 2 (2018): 145-65.
6 For work on race in music studies, see Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000). For calls from rhetorical scholars to examine the ways racial categories proliferate in quotidian or cultural discourses, see Kirt Wilson, The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place, 1870–1875 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002), Eric King Watts, Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Politics of the New Negro Movement (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012); Bryan McCann, The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017); Kelly Jakes, Strains of Dissent: Popular Music and Resistance in WWII France, 1940–1945 (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2019).
7 Eric King Watts, “The Problem of Race in Public Address Research,” in The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, ed. Shawn Perry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 375.
8 Lisa Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016), 4-24.
9 James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South:1860-1935 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 2-4.
10 Washington, quoted in Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 5. See also, Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
11 Free and enslaved Black Americans had already begun planning for the systematic education of Black people even before the Civil War. See Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 7-9.
12 Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 6.
13 For detailed accounts of white resistance, see Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 23 and Williams, Self-Taught, 179.
14 Cristin Ellis, Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 4, 25.
15 Ellis, Antebellum Posthuman, 30.
16 T.J. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 103-4.
17 George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 101.
18 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 27.
19 Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010), 106.
20 Quoted in Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 21.
21 Early examples of romantic racialism can be seen in antislavery advocates’ efforts to rework the dominant portrayal of Blacks as child-like into an argument for urgent emancipation. The natural propensity to innocence, kindness, and affection, they argued, should only intensify the nation's outrage over the atrocities committed against them. The forbearance that Black Americans demonstrated under slavery was also celebrated as a virtue of their unique racial temperament. Abolitionist Charles Stuart, for example, wrote that Blacks had done a remarkable job of “making the best of their miserable lot,” and were “exhibiting better qualities, than probably any other people on earth would exhibit under similar provocation.” See Charles Stuart, “On the Colored People of the United States,” Quarterly Anti-Slavery Magazine II (October 1836): 12-4. Quoted in Frederickson, The Black Image, 103.
22 Quoted in Frederickson, The Black Image, 105.
23 Ronald Radano, “American Modernism and the Idea of Black Rhythm,” in Music and the Racial Imagination, 464. For more on the ascription of natural musicality to Blacks, see Ronald Radano, “Denoting Difference: The Writing of the Slave Songs,” Critical Inquiry 22: 506–44 and Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
24 Roberts, Blackface Nation, 262-3.
25 Quoted in Edward Bailey Birge, History of Public School Music in the United States (Music Educators National Conference, 1966), 46.
26 Birge, History of Public School Music in the United States, 68.
27 See Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South and Ward, Dark Midnight When I Rise.
28 Ward, Dark Midnight When I Rise, 281-2.
29 Ward, Dark Midnight When I Rise, 282.
30 Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 30.
31 Leah Ceccarelli, “Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84, no. 4 (1998): 404.
32 Ceccarelli, “Polysemy,” 404.
33 Ceccarelli, “Polysemy,” 401.
34 Julie Kalil Schutten, “Invoking Practical Magic: New Social Movements, Hidden Populations, and the Public Screen, Western Journal of Communication 70, no. 4 (2006): 331-54.
35 Sara Hayden, “Michelle Obama, Mom-in-Chief: The Racialized Rhetorical Contexts of Maternity,” Women's Studies in Communication 40, no. 1 (2017): 11-28.
36 Danielle Endres, “Sacred Land or National Sacrifice Zone: The Role of Values in the Yucca Mountain Participation Process,” Environmental Communication 6, no. 3 (2012): 328-45.
37 Hayden, “Michelle Obama, Mom-in-Chief,” 15.
38 James Jasinski, “Instrumentalism, Contextualism, and Interpretation in Rhetorical Criticism,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, eds. Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 214.
39 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Agency, Promiscuous and Protean,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2005): 3.
40 Sandra Graham, “On the Road to Freedom: The Contracts of the Fisk Jubilee Singers,” American Music 24, no.1 (2006): 1-29.
41 For example, at fourteen and fifteen years old, respectively, Minnie Tate and Eliza Walker were not enrolled as students at Fisk, but were recruited to the Jubliee Singers nonetheless for their vocal talent. Of the original ten singers, only America Robinson earned her degree, graduating in 1875. Ward, Dark Midnight When I Rise, 124 and Graham, “On the Road to Freedom,” 27.
42 Program dated February 12, 1874. Fisk University, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections, Fisk Jubilee Archives.
43 Program dated June 2, 1875. Fisk University, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections, Fisk Jubilee Archives.
44 Around the time of the Civil War, the association between Africans and African Americans and music came to an expressive head. While essays on this topic came from southerners and foreign visitors, the most prolific authors of this fiction were white abolitionists who hoped that bringing slave songs to public consciousness would help humanize the slaves. See Ronald Radano, Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 168.
45 As Brian Roberts notes, the pervasiveness of singing on slave plantations has been exaggerated in nineteenth century accounts. Nonetheless, “the plantation seems to have produced its share of song,” as many enslaved people found singing a useful accompaniment to their labor. Roberts, Blackface Nation, 119-20.
46 Programs dated October 21, 1873 and March 18, 1875. Fisk University, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections, Fisk Jubilee Archives.
47 The choir was especially known for its pianissimo. George White used the following metaphor to emphasize the breath support that this required: “If a tiger should step behind you, you would not hear the fall of his foot, yet all the strength of the tiger would be in that tread.” Quoted in Ward, Dark Midnight When I Rise, 115.
48 Quoted in an undated program, likely from 1872. Fisk University, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections, Fisk Jubilee Archives.
49 Program dated March 18, 1875. Fisk University, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections, Fisk Jubilee Archives.
50 Quoted in Leonard B. Meyer, Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 166.
51 Meyer, Style and Music, 176.
52 Meyer, Style and Music, 175.
53 Radano, Lying up a Nation, 174.
54 James Stark, Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 149.
55 Program dated March 18, 1875. Fisk University, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections, Fisk Jubilee Archives.
56 Colin Brown, quoted in undated program, but probably 1872. Fisk University, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections, Fisk Jubilee Archives.
57 Tim Blanning, The Romantic Revolution (New York: Modern Library, 2012), 15-16.
58 Meyer, Style and Music, 177-178.
59 Quoted in program dated Oct. 21, 1873. Fisk University, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections, Fisk Jubilee Archives.
60 Program dated February 12, 1874. Fisk University, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Special Collections, Fisk Jubilee Archives.
61 Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization,” 17.
62 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Millennium Publications, 2014), 9.
63 “We Respond to the Historians Who Critiqued the 1619 Project,” The New York Times Magazine, December 20, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-the-historians-who-critiqued-the-1619-project.html.
64 Adam Serwer, “The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts,” The Atlantic, December 23, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/.
65 “Statement by President George W. Bush,” George W. Bush Presidential Center, accessed 11/22/2021, https://www.bushcenter.org/about-the-center/newsroom/press-releases/2020/06/statement-by-president-george-w-bush.html.