The Fisk Jubilee Singers were the first African-American musical performers to achieve national and international fame. Their moving performances of traditional Negro spirituals drew acclaim from American and British audiences between 1871 and 1878, followed by a successful world tour from 1884 to 1890. During this remarkable twenty-year run they played to packed houses, enthralled music critics everywhere, collaborated in the revival campaigns of Dwight Moody and Charles Spurgeon, and enjoyed the hospitality of royals and nobles on three continents.

The story of how a double handful of student singers, born in slavery, some of them still teenagers, could conquer the Victorian musical and religious worlds is the stuff of legend, but the Singers' status as the prime historical symbol of Negro uplift after the Civil War has also tended to preempt critical scholarship on the ensemble's origins, mission, leadership, operations, and influence. Toni P. Anderson has mined the Singers' papers and correspondence, newspaper accounts at the Fisk University archives, local history collections, and the records of the American Missionary Association (AMA) to provide an intimate and readable account that at last places their achievement in a critical historical perspective.

Anderson's principal contribution is to place Fisk University and the Jubilee Singers in the context of what she calls “Christian Reconstruction,” the AMA's militant program of Evangelical religion, liberal education, and acculturation to Victorian values and norms designed to produce proper leaders for the four million newly freed slaves. Immediately after the war, the Congregationalist-led AMA undertook heroic efforts to create Christian colleges in the South to serve the Freedmen. Fisk University in Nashville (1866) was designed by its leaders Adam Spence and Erastus Cravath to be a prime embodiment of this Christian Reconstruction strategy.

The founder of the Jubilee Singers was a Fisk faculty member named George Leonard White, who began informal music classes on campus, developed a remarkably talented vocal band of about a dozen student singers, and proposed in 1870 to lead them on a concert tour of Northern cities in order to raise money for the financially desperate school. One of the strongest features of Anderson's account is her description of the first crucial months of the initial 1871 tour, as the young singers struggled to perform their repertory of popular ballads, patriotic songs, and spirituals.

After a concert at Oberlin, however, White gained the support of Rev. Thomas K. Beecher of Elmira, New York. Thomas's enthusiastic endorsement convinced his brother Henry Ward Beecher to sponsor the Singers in December 1871 at his Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, where White's redesigned program of spirituals was a smash hit. A six-week run of sold-out bookings in New York followed, then a triumphant tour of New England. The critics raved, donations poured in to save Fisk University, and almost overnight the Jubilee Singers became a national phenomenon. Anderson tells this story well through the eyes of the Singers, White, Cravath, Spence, and the Beechers, giving it a multidimensionality that redresses the sense of inevitability resident in more popular accounts.

Anderson supplements this account by carefully examining the financial and administrative dimensions of the Jubilee Singers enterprise. White fully understood the need for advertising to introduce the Singers to the Evangelical public, and he developed a successful strategy of marketing through advance-men. Administratively, as soon as the Singers demonstrated their fundraising potential and symbolic power, AMA executives took over every phase of the operation except the management of the concert programs, which White retained until 1878.

The Singers emerge most clearly as individuals in their encounter with Victorian manners, embodied by the good and the great whom they meet in America, Britain, and Europe. Their audiences with Queen Victoria, Lord Shaftesbury, Prince Henry of Prussia, and lesser worthies taught them the elite style of international wealth and status. With it came the loss of naiveté, and Anderson effectively depicts the gradual breakdown of social relations among the Singers under the constant pressure and temptations of celebrity. By the time they concluded their second British tour in 1878, their accompanist and musical facilitator Ella Sheppard could lament that there was trouble “to the last” (169).

In the final chapters of the book, Anderson turns to the inevitable question of racism and the Singers' efforts to overcome it. She offers striking and unanimous evidence from their correspondence that they experienced England as a society utterly free of racial discrimination and the rest of the world as a far more egalitarian place than their American home. Anderson concludes with an assessment of the later careers of two leading Singers, Frederick J. Loudin, organizer of the world tour, and Ella Sheppard, minister and civil rights advocate, whose lives, she argues, demonstrate the long-term success of the Christian Reconstruction.

Anderson's careful presentation of the experiences of the Jubilee Singers and her location of the company's success in the religious, cultural, and institutional context of the AMA marks a significant advance in scholarship on this iconic African American musical ensemble. But her straightforward interpretation leaves some important questions unexamined. One cluster of issues is musical. Though the Singers gained their fame by singing Negro spirituals, Anderson offers disappointingly little treatment of them. She delivers the received interpretation that spiritual lyrics expressed an encoded double message of this-worldly political liberation and otherworldly spiritual salvation, but she provides no sustained assessment of the lyrical content of the Jubilee Singers concerts. Anderson also notes that Ella Sheppard “transcribed” the Singers' spirituals (194) but offers no details about how they were selected and arranged, or how they related to W. F. Allen, C. P. Ware, and L. M. Garrison's canonical field collection Slave Songs of the United States (New York: A. Simpson, 1867).

These musical questions relate in turn to underlying questions of race and class. The Jubilee Singers were a group of African American singers conceived, trained, and managed by their white teachers and AMA executives. Their opportunities were facilitated by elite white ministers and cultural figures; their audiences were successful urban whites. It would seem incumbent on their historical interpreter to interrogate closely the complex cultural dynamics at work in the Singers' performances, and to account for exactly why a group of young liberated slaves found fame among elite and middle-class whites, not by singing the Evangelical hymns that both races shared, but by reprising the sorrow songs of their own affliction.