f black children in 1866, and sang with them and
taught them to sing. And then they taught him to sing, and when once
the glory of the Jubilee songs passed into the soul of George L. White,
he knew his life-work was to let those Negroes sing to the world as
they had sung to him. So in 1871 the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee
Singers began. North to Cincinnati they rode,--four half-clothed black
boys and five girl-women,--led by a man with a cause and a purpose.
They stopped at Wilberforce, the oldest of Negro schools, where a black
bishop blessed them. 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 came to New York and Henry Ward Beecher dared to welcome
them, even though the metropolitan dailies sneered at his "Nigger
Minstrels." 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. Seven years they sang, and brought back a
hundred and fifty thousand dollars to found Fisk University.

Since their day they have been imitated--sometimes well, by the singers
of Hampton and Atlanta, sometimes ill, by straggling quartettes.
Caricature has sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of the music,
and has filled the air with many debased melodies which vulgar ears
scarce know from the real. But the true Negro folk-song still lives in
the hearts of those who have heard them truly sung and in the hearts of
the Negro people.

What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music
and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men,
and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of
the slave to the world. They tell us in these eager days that life was
joyous to the black slave, careless and happy. I can easily believe
this of some, of many. But not all the past South, though it rose from
the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs. They
are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment;
they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer
world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.

The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far more
ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here an