Among the many accomplishments of the landmark early tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers was building the reputation of Negro Spirituals. Bringing this music across the world was an important feat. But it was decades later, in 1909, that the ensemble took an important step in the preservation of spirituals that also allowed middle class Americans to become familiar with these sacred songs: they set foot in the recording studio.

In the very early 20th century, the only recordings that had been made by Black artists were self-deprecating and had their roots in minstrelsy. White quartets had mockingly recorded parodies of spirituals, full of truly offensive allusions. Outside of the recording studios, other groups were motivated by the financial success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers to attempt to capitalize on the genre. As historian Tim Brooks points out, this was a dire situation for Spirituals that could have easily led to their marginalization were it not for the preservation efforts of John W. Work II.

“When he took the position in the office at Fisk University he made it a crusade to sort of rescue the spiritual,” Brooks said, “as well as help Fisk University, and recapture some of that glory.”

Tim Brooks is the author of Lost Sounds, a look at the influence of African American musicians in the early days of the recording industry. In an interview last April he told the story of how John Work II, and later Mrs. Myers, worked with the Edison, Victor, and Columbia record companies.

Answers are edited for clarity and brevity

Let’s start with John Work II, and him coming into the directorship in 1898, because I feel like he was just as much a historian as a musician. Would you agree with that?

Yes, a folklorist, a folklorist.

During the [18]80s and 90s, there was a lot of mockery of the spiritual. The Fisks continued to tour in various incarnations, but they lost some of that luster that they had originally in the 70s. So when he took office, John Work II, he made it his crusade to sort of rescue the spiritual, as well as help Fisk University and recapture some of that glory. And it was a step by step process for another 10 years before he and Victor got together, of course. But he reformed the group, and began to slowly rebuild.

Columbia Records wax cylinder dictaphone machine, wikimedia commons

The act of recording and that was somewhat brave of him to do, actually, because recording was still considered kind of déclassé, I guess, and not very many Black people had phonographs either. So you’d have to sell it on a white market, you know, taking that step in 1909, making compromises to do it. You could only record with a quartet [ed. note: as opposed to the entire ensemble] because of technology. It was a somewhat brave thing to do, but boy did it pay off and spread the word, the gospel if you will, about the spirituals, and Black spirituals, and the Fisks themselves to an enormously wider audience.

How ubiquitous was having a phonograph or having a record store? How did you get the records? 

The record industry was what’s, in economics, called an oligopoly. There were three companies that ran it and it was a patent fortress. Basically, they own the patents for how you make a record. And patents were good for roughly 30 years at that time. So depending on various inventions in the [18]80s and 90s and so forth they were able to keep all competitors out. Anybody tried to make a record or tried to make a you know, the phonograph could be sued out of existence. Patents started to expire right after World War One.

Edison phonograph, wikimedia commons

The two big companies had two different marketing approaches. The Victor Talking Machine company believed in very high quality products and they made very good records for the time and universal availability. With high prices, they have big profit margins. To spend a dollar for a record in 1910 was a lot of money. So a lot of people couldn’t afford it anymore.

The Columbia Company, which shared patents with Victor so they could be in business, was a much more populous kind of company. They liked the big profits, too, but they were usually a little less expensive than Victor was. Their phonographs were a little less expensive than Victor’s. And Edison basically, he refused for a long time to even make flat press records. He believed the cylinders were the way to do it. So he had a different technology. But when he did make discs, he was on that high end, too, in a different recording system. So you could only play his records if you bought his machines. And that limited him quite a bit in terms of sales.

So records were high priced during the teens. Nevertheless, according to the research that I’ve done, the percent of U.S. homes that had a phonograph was close to half of all American homes. And remember a lot of American homes were shacks out in the Louisiana Delta or mining camps out west. It was  a much more rural country than it is today. So if half the country had a phonograph, that’s far more people could ever go to a vaudeville show or a concert or any other way of consuming entertainment. So that huge growth between 1910 and 1920, it really spread.

How did you buy them?

You had record stores. That’s a curiosity today.

Not in Nashville.

That’s true. That’s true.

In those days, Victor usually would have exclusive dealerships. So they’d be the Victor store. Columbia would have exclusive dealerships. So maybe that partner with a bicycle shop or something. And Edison had the same thing.

I remember interviewing a man who recorded in the late 19-teens. And he said, “You have to understand that it wasn’t called Victor Records. It was called The Victor. It was like a monument. It was just so well known.”

He said they were as widespread as postage stamps. I mean, everywhere you went was like ten twenty thousand of these stores across the country, little hamlets. They couldn’t set up their own store. They would partner with some furniture business or some businesses already there to be the Victor dealership. So, yes, they were available everywhere. They put a lot of promotional literature and they got a lot of publicity. So these records were widely, widely available, even in small towns.

Paint the picture of what they would have looked like, as the Fisk Jubilee Singers made that first recording.

There was no amplification. And you recorded by the force of your voice. Basically, there was a big metal horn with a wide opening going down to a small opening. You would stand directly in front of it and you would sing or speak loudly and clearly in order for the force of your voice to move a little cutting needle down there that incised your sound waves into a wax disc.

That’s how a record was made. Now think about that.

Among other things, only certain kinds of voices recorded. A  woman’s voice was much harder to record than a man’s voice because they tend to be softer. Choruses were almost impossible because how are you going to get 30 people or 20 people in front of this little horn and hear anything other than a muddy kind of sound?

And there was no fixing it in the edit because there was no edit. Whatever you sang into the horn, that was it. If you bumped against the horn, it would go clunk and you’d have to throw that out and start all over again. So it was, by our standards, very primitive and very limiting in how records were made and who could make them.

As a result, the record companies hired a small staff of professionals who had sharp voices, who knew how to work the horn, how to enunciate very clearly, and they would do it virtually all the same. There were very few celebrities who made recordings at that time. This is all the way up to 1925 when electrical recording finally came in. You had to have a certain kind of voice and as a result, this core of trained professionals made the records. There was very little personality put into it. It was just reading the notes and reading them very clearly and making sure that you could be understood very clearly and that kind of stuff.

And it’s clear that the Fisk singers, when they went into the studio in Camden, New Jersey, for the first time in 1909, they, of course, were already famous, but they were allowed to record their material in their way. And I think the Victor people would be the first ones to admit that they didn’t really understand the kind of music they were singing or their style. So as long as technically they could capture the sound, which they knew to be successful on the concert stage, then they were given much more latitude than the ordinary recording people were given. There was much less intercession into the recording process for them.

And that worked well for John Work II, because he had a style he had developed over time. The Fisks did, too. So it was kind of bringing that whole package. And Victor was quite willing to let him do that.

There’s no evidence that they modified how he (John Work II)  did things in order to meet their requirements. So I believe it’s pretty authentic to the way that the Fisk singers actually sang at that time.

Fortunately, they had voices that did record. They were all male, of course, at that time, and they had voices that were sharp enough and clear enough. So they passed that test. And then beyond that, in terms of repertoire, in terms of performance style, they were given a good deal of latitude.

John Work II’s voice is so present. You have to think: if it takes force to make that needle move, what must his voice have been like in person? It must have shaken the walls. I mean, one of the most powerful tenors of his time.

Yes. So many of those records. He’s right out front there.

I think there are like three or four major signposts in this story, turning points, if you will. And it’s only the first one, the founding, that we ever seem to hear about. The second signpost, I think, is this 1890s, John Work II taking over and really kind of rescuing and bringing them back to the kind of quality they had and the prominence they had in the early days. The next turning point, I would say, is when they started recording, because that’s when their fame goes like this. [gestures upward].

You can get a basket of seventy eights from the World War I era because they never disappear, it seems. And there will always be vaudeville songs and things like that. And Fisk will almost always be in there somewhere too. I mean, they were selling to everybody. And I have figures in my book about how many copies they did sell during certain periods and so forth. And it was, you know, millions. Doesn’t sound like much today, but, boy, it was a lot back then. There were no millions of dollars in that.

So that really lifted them to a whole new level and permeated the entire country in a way that they never could have done from the stage.

Was that the last milestone?

Mrs. James Myers, wikimedia commons

The next signpost, I would argue, would be after John Work II was fired and Rev. and Mrs. Myers took over the leadership. Because at that point, when he died, she became a force. She blended in with the male voices and helped sort of direct them by sound – it was very interesting.

The Fisk administration tried to fire her in the early 30s, and disband the singers. And she was so strong willed that she basically stared them down and continued through the 30s and into the 40s, leading the Fisk Jubilee Singers, despite the fact that the administration tried to fire her.

When did the technology switch from singing into the horn to singing into a microphone?

And they [the Fisk Jubilee Singers] did make some records in 1926 after that technology was new at the time. And the record companies very abruptly changed as soon as technology was available. And you could hear the difference, it just leapt out of the phonograph.

Most of the records back in that period were made by this horn method. But there are some that were made in the late 20s by the electrical method. And if you listen to them carefully, you can really hear differences, particularly in the blending of the voices and the distinctiveness of the individual voices because of the technology. And that will get you closer to what they would have sounded like, of course, in performance.

Thinking of each of these historical events and the lasting impact, what would you say the modern recording industry owes to the Fisk Jubilee singers?

I would say that the modern recording industry, and modern American popular music even more broadly, owes a great deal to them as pioneers of African-American cultural sensibilities into the mainstream of American music.

Before the singers began to tour the country, the only African-American performers that anybody ever heard were maybe a couple of novelty singers – novelty in the sense that they were looked on as novelties – who had brief careers in the 1850s or 60s and then disappeared. But the Fisk singers not only brought African-American singers to the stage in a respected way in an era that wasn’t respecting Black people in any other way, but they brought Black culture, something very inherent to Black culture, which would eventually morph into ragtime and jazz and soul and all kinds of things that infuse our cultural mix today. And if you go all the way back, standing at the very beginning of that, I think is the Fisk Jubilee Singers.