Recognizing the powerful potential for human connection in spirituals, Frederick Douglass said,

However, some of the first freeborn post-Civil War generation of African Americans distanced themselves from associations with enslavement in this folk music. Yet following emancipation, an entire industry developed around spirituals. Sandra Jean Graham's new book illuminates the history, economics, and cultural significance of this enduring American music.

Beginning in 1871, the Fisk Jubilee Singers pioneered concert spiritual performance for the American and European public. Fisk's first music director, George White, aspired to raise funds for the university through performance of spirituals. Yet, as Graham rightly foregrounds, the talent and ingenuity of Fisk student and music teacher Ella Sheppard were largely responsible for the Singers’ success. She collected the traditionally oral form of music and composed it in a new form – concert spirituals for ensemble a capella singing. Working within a sonic tradition of white aurality, she retained characteristics of the originals. Her concert spirituals moved beyond the spectacle of virtuosic black classical performance, to some extent accomplishing what Douglass had hoped – an emotional and religious connection with audiences. On the other hand, they tended to conflate the Singers, most of whom were freeborn, with the spirituals’ enslaved creators.

Graham's skillful reading of a wide variety of primary materials, such as audience accounts, missionary literature, obscure music publications, and musician scrapbooks, enables her to extract the aural and experiential impact of the Jubilee Singers. She is also attentive to performers’ experiences, as they were assaulted everywhere by racism despite their successes. White hearers consumed black music which touched their philanthropic and religious sensibilities but was also predicated on imaging black as fundamentally different. Nonetheless, Graham asserts, Fisk Jubilee Singers instigated a key intervention in popular culture, as their fame brought a flood of imitators. Spirituals became commercialized and frequently unmoored from Douglass's ideal of sympathetic, religious, and human connection.

Graham meticulously chronicles how, between the 1870s and 1890s, Jubilee troupes capitalized on the spirituals’ craze as whites composed versions for vaudeville and minstrelsy circuits. Instead of dignified, virtuosic performance, they offered song-and-dance numbers and comic caricatures of southern plantation life. Graham could have strengthened her argument here by historicizing the romanticized racism of plantation entertainment. Popularity of commercial Jubilee troupes fits contextually with the North's waning commitment, in the 1870s, to Reconstruction and protection of African American constitutional rights. As historian Eric Foner demonstrated in Reconstruction (1988), fear over Democrats' increasing control of the South inaugurated a national reimagination of the Civil War. Constructing South victimhood, inaugurating Confederate hagiography, and minimizing atrocities of chattel slavery contributed to white nostalgia for idealized southern agrarian life. These conditions reinvigorated white minstrelsy's perpetuation of extreme racist tropes. Yet black entertainers perceived this as an opportunity to perform as the “authentic” owners of spirituals.

Authenticity, Graham observes, was key to commercial Jubilee troupes in popular Uncle Tom shows. Black minstrel and commercial Jubilee performers infused Uncle Tom's Cabin productions with “authentic” black players and music. This revitalized the ubiquitous Uncle Tom market. Thus opportunity, narrowly conceived, benefited black entertainers in an industry “built on black culture, black ingenuity, and black bodies, and was embraced by black audiences who valued seeing their own community members onstage and knew how to look beyond the endless recycled stereotypes for subversive and affirming messages” (xv). Therefore, Graham argues, though whites continued to control many aspects of the entertainment industry, successful performers were those who appealed to both black and white audiences.

Graham's estimable work opens up fresh ways of examining blurred categories – black and white, sacred and commercial, classical and popular music – during the nineteenth century. The first Jubilee singers confounded white imagination of black bodies, humanity, and spirituality. Subsequent popular spirituals, by both black and white composers and performers, often cemented racial stereotypes, thereby furnishing American historical imagination with carefree, inherently musical portrayals of black American citizens. Nevertheless, utilizing these foundations, subsequent black culture makers like Lawrence Freeman, Harry T. Burleigh, Will Marion Cook, and J. Rosamond Johnson created new music that challenged racist ideology by “speaking to the heart and soul of the thoughtful” as Frederick Douglass had envisioned. Graham's work is a worthy contribution to America's complex racial and entertainment narratives.