A. Kori Hill
Did you know that a member of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Ella Sheppard (1851-1914), used to live in Cincinnati? She moved there around 1860, several years after her father, Simon, purchased her freedom. He bought her a piano, as she had always shown musical aptitude, and Ella began studying at Wilberforce School. But then her father died in 1866, and her stepmother had to sell the piano to cover his debts.
It was during this time that photographer James Presley Ball arranged for Ella to study voice with Caroline Staub Rivé. Rivé, a performer and composer, taught at Glendale Female College in Glendale, Ohio (right between Wyoming and Tri-County). But because Glendale didn’t allow Black students, Rivé not only taught Ella at home, but told her she could only come to her house at night and enter through the back door.
Ella’s lessons didn’t last long – Mr. Ball couldn’t continue the payments – but Ella would continue to develop her skills as a pianist and vocalist. She worked as a music teacher to support herself and moved back to her hometown of Nashville, where she enrolled at Fisk University, then known as Fisk Free Colored School. She eventually joined the Fisk faculty and was an original member of the Fisk Jubilee Singers starting in 1871, whose national and international tour famously saved the school from financial ruin.
Ella was the group’s accompanist, voice coach, assistant conductor and assistant director. She also oversaw the repertoire the group would perform, which included transcribing and arranging spirituals. For some vocal performers and teachers, Ella’s arrangements are a precursor to Harry T. Burleigh’s concert spirituals. It’s important to remember that at first, The Fisk Jubilee Singers didn’t perform Negro spirituals – their repertoire was classical and popular song. It was only after the urging of George White, their founder, who overheard some of the members perform the works in private, that they added them to their recitals, and became a critical and commercial success.
If you take a look at Sheppard’s transcription of “I’m Going to Sing All the Way,” you can see the mixture of four-part choral texture, juba rhythms (the sixteenth note – eighth note – sixteenth note figure), and the rhythmic homophony between the piano vocal lines (also peep where it was published!). These elements reflect the intersection of western classical and African American idioms.
While I was unable to find an accessible recording of this spiritual, it’s important to see Ella’s structural and stylistic choices too. This helps us understand how the group developed what is now known as the “Fisk Jubilee Sound,” an aesthetic continued by the group to this day.
