“Go, Tell it On the Mountain”
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Original post By
C. Michael Hawn
12/15 edited 7/24 JM
“Go, tell it on the mountain” provides the opportunity to tell the story of how singing African American spirituals saved a university.
The Fisk Jubilee Singers (drawing their name from Leviticus 25—the year of jubilee) were founded as a ten-member touring ensemble to raise funds for debt-ridden Fisk University. Taking the entire contents of the University treasury with them for travel expenses, they departed on October 6, 1871, from Nashville on their difficult, but ultimately successful eighteen-month tour, a triumph that is still celebrated annually as Jubilee Day on the campus. Though not the original repertoire of the group, by the time they reached New York in December of that year, their concerts grew to include more and more spirituals, until their program consisted primarily of choral arrangements of spirituals or, according to African American scholars C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya, “anthemized spirituals.”
They have been credited with keeping the Negro spiritual alive. Spirituals scholar Sandra Jean Graham places this development in context: “The students were at first reluctant ambassadors for the songs of their ancestors. As [Jubilee] singer Ella Sheppard recalled, ‘The slave songs were never used by us then in public. They were associated with slavery and the dark past and represented the things to be forgotten. Then, too, they were sacred to our parents, who used them in their religious worship . . . It was only through persuasion that the students sang their spirituals privately for [the University’s treasurer, George L.] White [who was a white man], and through White’s coercion that they sang them in concert.”
Taking the spiritual to white and black audiences in the United States and Europe earned the school and the spiritual an international reputation. The small ensemble of two quartets and a pianist grew to a full choral ensemble. Other historically black colleges eventually followed the same pattern, including Howard University (Washington, D.C.) and Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University, Tuskegee, Alabama).
Concert arrangements of spirituals were published in Frederick Work’s New Jubilee Songs, as Sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers (1902), a collection that may have been co-edited by John Wesley Work, though his name does not appear in this collection. “Go, tell it” appears in another collection for solo voice and four-part choir edited by John Wesley Work, III (Work, Jr.’s son) in American Negro Songs and Spirituals: a Comprehensive Collection of 230 Folk Songs, Religious and Secular (1940).
John Wesley Work, Jr. (sometimes designated John Wesley Work II to distinguish him from his son) received his master’s degree from Fisk University, and after further study at Harvard, began teaching Latin and Greek at the University in 1898. He trained the Jubilee Singers and was a leader in preserving and performing African American spirituals. He taught at Fisk University
until 1923 when he was relieved of his duties due to changing attitudes toward the spiritual. He then went on to be President of Roger Williams University in Nashville until his death in 1925.
The spiritual has inspired works in other media. Author James Baldwin’s (1924-1987) first major work and semi-autobiographical novel was titled Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). The novel discusses the role of the paradoxical church as experienced by African Americans, both as the incubator for repression and hypocrisy and as a foundation for hope, identity, and community. The ABC network produced a movie using this title in 1984.
Regardless of which version that is sung, “Go, tell it on the mountain” has become a truly American contribution to the telling of the Christmas story that is now sung around the world.