Travel into the heart of Nashville, Tennessee, the capital of country music, and you can visit the home of a choral group credited with popularizing and preserving another uniquely American music form, the Negro Spiritual.

Nashville’s Fisk University is one of the nation’s oldest, traditionally black schools of higher learning. It was founded in the 1860’s, shortly after the end of the American Civil War.

Fisk is perhaps best known as the home of the Jubilee Singers. Paul Kwame is the group's current director. He says the Jubilee’s helped the University survive the difficult years following emancipation, a time when the former slaves battled grinding poverty as well as racial bigotry.

"Fisk was a school that was formed for educating children of freed slaves and this was in the year 1866," Dr. Kwame says. "After the founding of the school, five years actually after the founding, the school ran into financial difficulty and was about to be closed down."

To keep that from happening, the school’s first treasurer hit upon and unusual fund raising idea. He formed a small touring ensemble of young, black vocalists to represent Fisk nationwide.

Dr. Kawme explains, "So the first group consisted of nine students. They were trained and they set out in the year of 1871 and they traveled all over the United States."

The 1871 tour did raise enough money to keep the school open but within two years funds were short once more and the Jubilee Singers hit the road again. This time they traveled to Europe where they were given the opportunity to perform for British royalty.

Director Kwame says, "We talk a lot about that famous European tour, because while they were in England, the Queen of the time, Queen Victoria, got her court painter to make a painting of these eleven students, all because she was so pleased with their music."

As each school year begins, succeeding generations of Fisk students compete for the opportunity to join the chorus. Student Darci Chisolm served as a Jubilee apprentice for two years before being allowed to perform with the group on stage this past October.

"It was just unreal how it feels to actually be on stage and to realize that you’re actually walkin’ in the shoes that so many people have looked upon to actually keep the university going," Darci remembers. "It was almost heavenly the way it felt."

The story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers was recently chronicled in the book Dark Midnight When I Rise, by American author Andrew Ward. Mr. Ward says the Jubilees made an invaluable contribution, not just to the university, but to the world of music.

"Up to that point white audiences had been exposed primarily to sort of ersatz African American music; Stephen Foster songs, minstrel shows," author Ward explains. "These were the first authentic African American songs to attain any kind of popularity in the country. They were the ones who introduced Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and Deep River and Go Down Moses and many of the songs we now regard as a part of the universal canon of sacred music."

And Andrew Ward believes the real story of the Jubilees goes well beyond the music to a consideration of the courage shown by the original singers. As they traveled the nation, the Jubilees constantly challenged segregationist policies on housing and public access evident in both northern and southern states.

Mr. Ward concludes, "I hope it enhances our appreciation of the extraordinary distance they were able to travel in a very short time, and how courageously – at a time when people were being lynched for asserting even the most fundamental human rights – how courageously they stood up for black rights and simply for human rights even though they had seen racism at its most terrible."

If you would like to learn more about the Jubilees, visit the Fisk University web site at www.fisk.edu. The home of the Jubilee Singers and the Negro Spiritual in Nashville, Tennessee, just another stop along the American Highway.