by Paul R. Spitzzeri
A notable event in the history of the early African-American community of Los Angeles took place in late January 1876 when the Tennessee Jubilee Singers, an ensemble of men and women from Fisk University, who formed about five years earlier to help raise funds for the institution founded in 1866 and financially struggling, made its appearance in the Angel City with additional performances in San Bernardino and Anaheim.
This might well have been the first instance of concerts given by Black artists on an Angel City stage and it was given some significant media attention, with Los Angeles increasingly becoming an important southern California stop for performers of all kinds, musical, theatrical and otherwise at venues like the Merced Theater and Turnverein Hall, as it underwent its first significant and sustained period of growth through the summer of 1875.
When the boom went bust, however, the economic environment of greater Los Angeles and, more broadly, California belatedly joined the malaise that began nationally with the Depression of 1873, leading to what has generally been called the “Long Depression,” lasting through the remainder of the Seventies. Still, the appearance of the Jubilee Singers was a noteworthy event, coming just a couple of weeks after the failure of the Temple and Workman bank and the continued worsening of the local financial picture.
The Los Angeles Express of the 17th, just four days after the closure of that institution, commented that the ensemble’s manager, C.A. Caswell, visited to say that the group was expected in about a week, having just finished a two-week engagement in San Francisco. The paper observed that, from notices in the eastern states as well as in the northern metropolis, “we are justified in expecting a high order of merit from this combination.” Moreover, it noted “as there has been a dearth of amusements in Los Angeles as of late,” likely due to the economic downturn, “they will doubtless play to crowded houses.”
The edition of the following day included a brief statement that “the Jubilee Singers . . . will play to rousing houses” as “they are characterized by decided merit, and they are of the genuine negro race.” An accompanying advertisement proclaimed that this was an “Attraction Extraordinary!!” and that the Turnverein Hall, built by a German club of that name that frequently hosted concerts, would be the venue for three days of performances, including one matinee.”
The ad continued that the ensemble “sing with wonderful pathos and power the quaint, weird, touching songs of The Slave Cabin And The Camp Meeting Down In De Wilderness,” with this bit of Black dialect deemed necessary for some reason, while it was added that “they sing over 100 Slave Melodies.” Just more than a dozen years after the Emancipation Proclamation, such descriptions would have appealed to the many white Angelenos who hailed from the South. Admission was $1 for floor seats and 50 cents for those in the gallery.
The Star of the 18th repeated that Caswell was in the city to prepare the way for the Jubilee Singers and it remarked, casually enough as whites were wont to do when talking about African-Americans:
Now, here is fun. We saw them in Washington about three years ago. There are ten of them—five men and five women—real niggers, and the way they do the old plantation business is a caution.
The third major English-language newspaper in Los Angeles, the Herald, briefly informed its readers in its edition of the 19th that “the far-famed Tennessee Jubilee Singers . . . are the original troupe who have created such a sensation in the East, and our citizens can calculate on a rich treat.” This was because, as noted above, “the old plantation melodies will cause many of us to think of old times, and in spirit ‘carry us back to old Virginia.'” Notably, a song by that name was written in 1878 by James A. Bland, called the “Black Stephen Foster,” and the tune was long the state song of that state.
Three days later, the Herald shared a notice from the Chicago Times about the ensemble, in which the performances by ex-slaves “are of so unique a character as to render it almost impossible to describe them to persons who have not heard the strange melody and style of their singing.” The same day’s Express cited a review from the Philadelphia Press penned the prior November, though it reported there were a dozen singers (five men and seven women, with all but one a former slave), and which mentioned the “music which stands quite by itself in melodious richness and wild, unfettered harmony.”
A more detailed review from the Cincinnati Inquirer appeared in the Express of the 25th, which also reported that delay in the steamer, Senator, ferrying the troupe from San Francisco and leaving it held over for a day in Santa Barbara, meant that the opening would be delayed by that amount of time. The Ohio paper commented that,
The curious concerts . . . were quite a little treat, not by reason of any unusual excellence of vocal execution, but because of the uniqueness of the performance. Yet musically considered, the entertainment was very successful. Several of the colored singers possess remarkably fine voices, sweetly clear, flexible, and characterized by that rich intonation and far-reaching power peculiar to the negro voice.
Three of the performers were singled out, with Henry Hunley’s bass possessing a “liquid depth” and his work showing no “strained effort,” while “Miss Ewing,” said to be “quite a dark girl,” having a soprano voice with “a silvery flexibility and a breezy freshness” that only needed “proper management.” Annie Henderson, also an organist, “is a very good mezzo soprano, especially in her lower register,” but it was added that “she is attractive in appearance, a pretty quadroon [a light-skinned Black person], rather tall and slender, and brimming over with vitality.”
As an ensemble, however, is where the Cincinnati sheet felt that “the quaint, old, and wonderfully touching, or rollicking melodies of slave life [are] render[ed] with a perfection seldom heard now” because these tunes that were “the corner-stone and the life-blood of American minstrelsy” were less often performed as “the abandonment of them [by] the burnt-cork profession . . . sinking into disrepute.” This mean the white minstrels who performed in blackface as minstrels developed from the 1830s onward, but the diminution of these older figures meant that “the old road to fortune is open to just bands” as the Jubilee Singers.
Reviewing the first concert, the Herald of the 27th reported,
Turn-Verein Hall was crow[d]ed from orchestra chairs to gallery last night, and it is safe to say that the Jubilee Singers made the most decided hit of the season. The whole programme of the evening was simply a series of encores. Everybody laughed at the quaint old-fashioned melody and humor, and everyone went away on the close of the performance wishing there had been more of it. The most attractive because the most novel portions of the entertainment were the old negro hymns and melodies . . .
The paper claimed that “we cannot with justice enter into details in describing” the concert because “each part was equally worthy of note” and many songs elicited encores, but it also remarked that the performance for that evening was to be held “with an entire change of programme.” It concluded by advising its readers that “all who like music and fun, with a touch of old-fashioned piety, should not fail to attend” because the Turnverein was sure to be packed and tickets were to be purchased ahead of time.
That day’s Express observed that the owner of the San Francisco house where the Singers performed was sued for not allowing African-Americans to attend, but it stated,
We noticed last night . . . that our sable-hued friends were scattered all through the audience, quite as a matter of course. Nobody seemed to take umbrage at their presence, and they doubtlessly thought that an entertainment given by persons of their own race was the very time and place to assert the equality guaranteed to them by a special amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
At the Grand Central Hotel, located on Main Street next to the former quarters of the Hellman, Temple and Company bank, the troupe not only stayed in rooms, but took its meals in the dining room. Only a man from Kentucky was bothered by this, the paper reported, and quietly left his table and exited the dining room, returning to his room.
For the Express, these facts meant that,
This is a brave change in our social habits. The time was, and not long ago, either, when the appearance of a man of African blood in the auditorium of a theater, or at the breakfast table of a first-class hotel, would have set things in a fearful commotion. We are undoubtedly in the very heart of a transition in social matters. Things are being so far modified that the presence of a negro is no longer felt to be a personal contamination in public places.
What was not clear, the paper mused, was “how long the revolution will rest there, and whether it will ever advance any further in the United States.” How much of the evolution of thinking on these matters was a consequence of the demographics of the late boom, in which the Southern dominance among the white population was significantly weakened—even F.P.F. Temple, a Republican, was able to win election as county treasurer in the recent election (despite the problems with his bank).
For the second Jubilee Singers performance, the Express of the 28th noted that “the largest house we ever remember to have seen in Los Angeles assembled” at the Turnverein. For encores, the palm went to Lulu Henderson and it was added that “the Henderson family, represented by three sisters and a brother, are the backbone of the combination,” while her spotlight in “Mocking Bird” was such that it “seemed to take the fancy of her auditors greatly.”
The account went on that “camp-meeting songs were the staple of the evening” and, while the “end men” who were at the end of a line of performers and provided comic interludes were missed, “the programme is an excellent one, notwithstanding.” The paper also praised the fact that “the exercises of the evening wound up with a ‘walk ’round,’ such as usually closed camp-meetings during the old days in the South.
In its review of the same show, the Herald, also of that date, remarked that “the enthusiasm created by their first appearance was increased ten-fold” in the packed auditorium “and the manner in which each song was received must have been extremely gratifying to the performers.” As before, the paper demurred on going into too many details, offering that “it was unique, and only those who have witnessed the slave at home and at camp-meeting in the olden time, who have not witnessed the performance of this band of singers, can have any idea of its character.”
Additionally, the Herald commented, the concert “was funny and pathetic, wild and weird, it was inimitable.” White minstrels could not possibly have done anything like it and it was noted that “their quaint melodies drew tears from the eyes of many, mingled with smiles, and no doubt recalled the days of their childhood more vividly than anything else could have done.” Nothing more powerful could have been said in a review that the remark that,
One old colored lady who sat near us, with the smiles and tears blended on her face, would now and then in a low voice join in the choruses, evidently quite forgetful that she was not back in the old cabin home.
One wonders if this was Biddy Mason, who was then about 58 years old, or Winnie Owens, who was a decade older, as there were not many African-American women of their generation in Los Angeles. This remark and the observations about the mixed audience and the Jubilee Singers taking meals at the Grand Central dining room are especially interesting and instructive about the situation involving Black Angelenos a century and a half ago.
The third show was rescheduled to 30 January after a performance at San Bernardino, though it was reported by the Express the following day that it was “a fair audience,” presumably meaning somewhat lighter in attendance, though “their performance was fully up to their usual standard.” Having been well-received in the eastern town, the Singers performed to appreciatie audiences in Anaheim on that last day of the month and the first of February, before returning to the Angel City for a final farewell concert on the 2nd.
As the Temple and Workman bank inventory, conducted by its assignees, had just been released, there were no reviews located in the Los Angeles press for this last performance. There was, however, a notable surprise for George Trent, a shoe-shiner in town, who “discovered a relative in one of the ladies of the Jubilee troupe, one who used to live on the same old plantation.”
The Tennessee Jubilee Singers remained together for another couple of years before disbanding in 1878 because of the grueling schedule kept in those seven years of its existence, though its earnings paid for an impressive Jubilee Hall that still stands at Fisk. The following year, however, a new edition was formed and what is now the Fisk Jubilee Singers are still with us today—an episode of the PBS show, The American Experience, highlights the history of this time-honored ensemble, whose appearance in Los Angeles a century-and-a-half-ago made an indelible impression on its residents, white and Black.