Music City U.S.A.

Fisk University was five years old and nearly bankrupt when its treasurer, George L. White, took nine students out of Nashville on 6 October 1871 to sing for money. Most of them had been born into slavery. They sang spirituals, which had never been performed as concert music for white audiences, and White named them the Jubilee Singers for the year of jubilee in Leviticus, the year in which the enslaved were to go free. Ella Sheppard accompanied them on piano. The tours ran for years and eventually reached Britain, where in May 1873 they sang for Queen Victoria in a side room at Argyll Lodge in Kensington; she had arrived while they were singing for the Duke of Argyll and asked to hear them herself. They sang at William Gladstone's house too. They were the first group to take the spiritual out of the church and put it on a concert platform, and much of what the wider world knew of American Black music for the next fifty years came through them. The money they raised built Jubilee Hall, finished in 1876, the university's first permanent building and still the oldest on the campus. The story Nashville likes to tell is that the Queen said the singers must come from a city of music, and that the nickname followed. It is a good story, no contemporary record of the remark has ever been produced, and a long serving director of the Jubilee Singers has said flatly that it is not true. The phrase that actually stuck arrived eighty years later and from the other end of town: in 1950 the WSM announcer David Cobb, introducing a Red Foley broadcast, ad libbed Music City U.S.A. on the air. The chamber of commerce has not let go of it since.