Spiritual Journey: The freed slaves who brought the gospel to the world | The music

IIn 1873, a choir of African-American students – all but two former slaves – went to London for a fundraiser. Recommended by Mark Twain, who wrote: "I would walk for 11 km to hear them sing again … they reproduce the true melody of the plantations", the Fisk Jubilee Singers then gave concerts throughout Europe and beyond, thus introducing spiritual world.

In England, Prime Minister William Gladstone invited them to a private breakfast. Queen Victoria specifically asked them to sing Steal Away. The Nashville folklore has been incorporated into the fact that it is the Queen's delighted praise that has given his Tennessee home town the Music City soubriquet.

She also packed them with great memories of their visit: a mbadive group portrait commissioned from her official portraitist, Edmund Havell, who occupies a prominent place in the university building that the 11 singers and their director, George White, funded with their grueling two-year tour. "For me," wrote one of the most famous students of Fisk University, the sociologist and civil rights advocate WEB Dubois, "Jubilee Hall seemed to have always been doing the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of work. "

Although the original group dissolved after arriving home, a new group has been formed and has been operating since. One of their party tricks is to replicate Havell's portrait in a complete Victorian platform for graduation ceremonies, but they also have a more serious mission that has kept them on the road for 150 years. "The music we sing today helps bridge the gap between Africans and African Americans," says Professor Paul Kwami, a Ghanaian who studied in Fisk and has been the Singers' music director for 25 years. Under his direction, they supported Neil Young and Emmylou Harris and continue to interpret the same spiritual repertoire, ranging from Go Down Moses to Nobody Knows the Problem, in about 30 concerts a year, with a six-date tour sweeping them from New York to Nashville.

But their story is not only important for the United States. The archives across the UK bear the traces of an exceptional visit that has been moreover almost forgotten. In Scotland, not only did they sing in Edinburgh, but they also sailed to entertain the islanders of Bute. One of the singers, tenor Thomas Rutling, is based in Harrogate. In Hackney, London – where I live – they gave several concerts, inspiring a ruined school of the first British gospel choir.

My own fascination for their story began when I was asked to help with the libretto of an oratorio by composer Harvey Brough and librettist Justin Butcher. They were working in a 1888 book, discovered by the historian of the Gospel Viv Broughton, which told the story largely from the point of view of White, a former cavalry officer of the United States. Union who became the treasurer of the fledgling university at one point. old barracks of the Civil War Army. There must have been a moment, says Brough, when the singers took control, realizing that their own music was more powerful than the white repertoire with which they had started (featuring jewels forgotten for a very long time, Esther – The Beautiful Queen from WE Bradbury).

And there, suddenly, it was in a doubly documented account of a meeting between the singers and the president of the college in 1871. "One day, wrote the president, he entered my room some students with an air mysterious. The door was closed and locked, the curtains of the windows were drawn and, as if something they were ashamed of, they were singing some of the songs of religious slaves of long ago, known for a long time under the name of jubilee songs.

The story is repeated in the diaries of Ella Sheppard, who will become the main soprano, the accompanist and director on stage of the Jubilee Singers: "Sitting on the floor (there were few chairs ) [we sang] gently, learning from each other the songs of our fathers. We have never dreamed of using them in public. "

It was a meeting that changed the course of the history of music. As Kwami says, "the Fisk Jubilee Singers turned the spiritual black man into a form of art and brought it into the world". During their trip, they also challenged racial prejudice and, on certain important occasions, forced changes to the law. George Pullman himself intervened to end the separate seats on his trains after the singers were denied first-clbad seats. And Jersey City voted in favor of integrating its schools after an unpleasant confrontation with a local hotelier. "With their sweet songs and simple manners," writes the New Jersey Journal, "Jubilee Singers shape and fabricate public sentiment."

With such financial and artistic success, the imitators were quick to launch, forcing the Fisk Jubilee Singers to make themselves known. Nevertheless, says Kwami, "people are still discovering history". Dubois did not doubt their importance, thus consolidating them on the foundations of the civil rights movement by dedicating them a chapter of his 1903 clbadic, The Souls of Black Folk. "Our song, our toil, our joy of living and our warnings have been given to this nation in the fraternity of blood," he wrote. "Are not these gifts worthy of being offered? Is not it a job and effort? Would America have been America without its Negro people?

It is a message that remains clear, true and urgent in today's increasingly intolerant climate – not just in America, but around the world.

• Freedom Song, by Harvey Brough and Justin Butcher, will be played at Hackney Empire, London, on March 24th.