The most significant thing I learned about American music would have to be the origin of spirituals. George L. White, Fisk University’s
treasurer and music director in 1866, encouraged a few African American students to share their culture music with him. They weren't willing to share the music that was rich with slave codes and messages of their ancestors, handed down to them by their mothers and fathers, but they did. He then took their intimate slave music and intertwined it with the standard systemic European style of music and gave
birth to the genre we know today as Negro spirituals.
In his efforts to save the university from financial ruin he took the students on a tour, naming them, Fisk Jubilee Singers. They were not received well in the beginning but eventual
it caught America’s attention creating a path for other chorale singers of the “spirituals”
genre…
