The Jubilee Singers, at Lucerne, and now on a record
In 1897 I heard the Fisk Jubilee Singers in a hotel at Lucerne and forgot I was in Europe. Now they have been put on gramophone records, and I can forget it whenever I like. Press play; nothing plays until you do.
Twelve years ago, in Lucerne, I went down to the hotel parlour of an evening because somebody said there was singing, and I expected the usual Swiss arrangement: a yodel, a cowbell and a collection. Instead it was the Jubilee Singers from Fisk University in Tennessee, and they sang the old plantation songs as I had heard them sung when I was a boy in Missouri, and I sat there with the tears running down and did not care who saw.
Now the young men with machines have caught them on gramophone records, which I did not think could be done to a thing like that. Here is the one I would save from a fire, as the modern people have it on their Spotify:
And the same song as Apple keeps it, from the very first records they made, between 1909 and 1911. The hiss is the year. Listen past it.
If one song is not enough, and it was not for me, here is the whole of those first records together. Play it while you read something else of mine. It will improve the reading.
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Europe has the cathedrals, but we have this, and I would not trade.
A note on the machinery: nothing on this page plays, and nothing is fetched from Spotify or Apple, until you press the button. I approve of that. Music ought to wait to be asked, like a good guest and unlike the gondoliers of Venice.
Read nextThe only moving picture of meThe same summer, the same young men with machines.
Lucerne, Switzerland