Jubilee Hall: Built by Song
Tennessee
Jubilee Hall at Fisk University in Nashville was literally paid for by singing. In eighteen seventy-one, Fisk was deeply in debt and on the verge of closing. Music professor George White took a small group of students, most of them formerly enslaved, on a fundraising tour through the North.
They sang Negro spirituals, a genre most white audiences had never heard performed this way. Audiences wept. Donations flooded in.
The Fisk Jubilee Singers eventually toured Europe, performed for Queen Victoria, and raised one hundred fifty thousand dollars. With that money, Fisk built this Victorian Gothic building, dedicated on January first, eighteen seventy-six. Inside hangs a floor-to-ceiling portrait of the original Jubilee Singers given by Queen Victoria herself.
The hall is a National Historic Landmark, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers still perform today.
