Book Fisk Jubilee Singers

The Fisk Jubilee Singers won the Grammy for Best Roots Gospel Album with Celebrating Fisk! (The 150th Anniversary Album), received the National Medal of Arts in 2008, and have carried the African American spiritual to audiences around the world since 1871. The a cappella ensemble is made up of students at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, a historically Black university founded after the Civil War to educate freedmen. In 1871 the young school faced bankruptcy, and its treasurer and music director, George Leonard White, organized a touring choir to raise funds. The original singers performed traditional spirituals across the United States, traveling routes of the Underground Railroad, and in Europe, where they sang for Queen Victoria. Their tours funded Jubilee Hall, the first permanent building for the education of Black students in the South. Their 1909 recording of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" was added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry in 2002. Later generations of singers continued touring at home and in Europe, and the ensemble released In Bright Mansions in 2003. The ensemble has two Grammy nominations.