#Define folks full#

Seven years they sang, and brought back a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to found Fisk University. They came to New York and Henry Ward Beecher dared to welcome them, even though the metropolitan dailies sneered at his вЂњNigger Minstrels.вЂќ So their songs conquered till they sang across the land and across the sea, before Queen and Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland, Holland and Switzerland. Then they went, fighting cold and starvation, shut out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered at, ever northward and ever the magic of their song kept thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in the Congregational Council at Oberlin revealed them to the world. They stopped at Wilberforce, the oldest of Negro schools, where a black bishop blessed them. North to Cincinnati they rode,вЂ“four half-clothed black boys and five girl-women,вЂ“led by a man with a cause and a purpose. So in 1871 the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee Singers began. White, he knew his life-work was to let those Negroes sing to the world as they had sung to him. And then they taught him to sing, and when once the glory of the Jubilee songs passed into the soul of George L. Here he formed a Sunday-school class of black children in 1866, and sang with them and taught them to sing. Then he fought at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and finally served in the FreedmanвЂ™s Bureau at Nashville. There was once a blacksmithвЂ™s son born at Cadiz, New York, who in the changes of time taught school in Ohio and helped defend Cincinnati from Kirby Smith. But the world listened only half credulously until the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the slave songs so deeply into the worldвЂ™s heart that it can never wholly forget them again. Thomas Wentworth Higginson hastened to tell of these songs, and Miss McKim and others urged upon the world their rare beauty. Their appearance was uncouth, their language funny, but their hearts were human and their singing stirred men with a mighty power. The Sea Islands of the Carolinas, where they met, were filled with a black folk of primitive type, touched and moulded less by the world about them than any others outside the Black Belt. Then in war-time came the singular Port Royal experiment after the capture of Hilton Head, and perhaps for the first time the North met the Southern slave face to face and heart to heart with no third witness. Some, like вЂњNear the lake where drooped the willow,вЂќ passed into current airs and their source was forgotten others were caricatured on the вЂњminstrelвЂќ stage and their memory died away. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.ДЄway back in the thirties the melody of these slave songs stirred the nation, but the songs were soon half forgotten. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-songвЂ“the rhythmic cry of the slaveвЂ“stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty.

#Define folks full#

Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past. To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil. Then in after years when I came to Nashville I saw the great temple builded of these songs towering over the pale city. They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine. Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. And so before each thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. THEY that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden daysвЂ“Sorrow SongsвЂ“for they were weary at heart.