By Mark Stryker

Detroit - It's midnight when the Fisk University Jubilee Singers arrive at the Memphis train station. It's 1871 and the former slaves are in the midst of an arduous tour to raise money to prevent their failing school from bankruptcy.

The choir finds the door locked, the station deserted. Suddenly, a mob materializes out of the darkness wielding torches, rifles and clubs. The singers shiver with terror.

The cast during rehearsal of the play SING JUBILEE!  Photo by Romain Blanquart

George White, the white Northerner and Fisk treasurer who organized the tour, steps in front of the lynch mob.

He raises his hand and his students begin to literally sing for their lives:
In the morning when I rise/ Give me Jesus.

The song, a plaintive Negro spiritual, dissolves the evil in the air the way that the sun melts ice. The rioters retreat, their leader reduced to tears.

The scene, a turning point in the history of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and in the history of American music, stands at the center of "Sing Jubilee," a play by OyamO (Charles Gordon) that receives its world premiere this weekend by Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit. The play tells the remarkable story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers who, facing brutal social conditions and segregation, introduced white audiences to Negro spirituals, the religious folk songs of African-American slaves.

The Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, circa 1875.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers were the first to transform the spiritual from a folk form into concert music, forging a tradition inherited in the 20th Century by black classical singers like Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson and continuing today with Jessye Norman, Denyce Graves, Detroit's Brazeal Dennard Chorale and others.

The first black idiom to cross over to mainstream America, spirituals would have a profound impact on the development of blues and jazz, and their influence can be heard in composers as diverse as Gershwin, Dvorak and Charles Mingus.

"The Fisk Jubilee Singers were the fountainhead of a continuing stream of musicians who trace their sources back to the praise and sorrow songs that Ella Sheppard and her schoolmates first shyly performed for their white mentor ... in the curtained dark of Fisk's decaying barracks," writes Andrew Ward in "Dark Midnight When I Rise," a now out of print history of the Jubilee Singers that was published in 2000.

The cast during rehearsal of the play SING JUBILEE!  Photo by Romain Blanquart

The subject is a natural for Mosaic, recognized nationally as one of America's most ambitious youth theaters. Mosaic favors new works on historical themes and specializes in plays with music. Mosaic's high school performers are about the same age as the nine original Fisk Jubilee Singers, and spirituals have always been a staple of the Mosaic Singers. The company's annual tours have even taken the troupe to the Nashville, Tenn., campus of Fisk, a historically black college where the Fisk Jubilee Singers remain active.

"We look for stories that we can uniquely tell," said Rick Sperling, Mosaic founder and CEO.

'Their past is a treasure'
"Sing Jubilee" chronicles how the Jubilee singers struggled to find an audience until they supplemented their repertoire of classical music and sentimental tunes with spirituals, the secret plantation songs embedded in their memory. Within six months they raised $25,000, enough to retire the school's debts and buy the 25 acres of land that housed Fisk. Eventually, the choir would raise more than $150,000, change racial perceptions and perform abroad for European royalty.

The play shows how the singers were initially reluctant to sing spirituals because the songs seemed undignified and a painful reminder of slavery.

"The dramatic arc is the realization by these young singers that their past is a valuable treasure, and there's no reason to be ashamed of it," says OyamO, 64, associate professor of playwriting at the University of Michigan. "To deny your past is wrong. It's a part of you, and you're cheating yourself because you've created something so beautiful in these songs."

The cast during rehearsal of the play SING JUBILEE!  Photo by Romain Blanquart

That's a message that even superstars have had to learn. Mezzo soprano Denyce Graves was a student at Oberlin when an elderly African-American man came up to her after a recital and admonished her for not including any spirituals. He grabbed her shoulders and looked deeply into her eyes: "Ms. Graves, if we don't sing these, who will?"

"Since that day, I have always programmed spirituals on every recital that I sing," says Graves. "Spirituals form a vital part of the rich music heritage of African Americans."

A compelling story
On a recent Wednesday evening the cast of "Sing Jubilee" rehearses at Mosaic's home at University Preparatory High School just north of Wayne State University. The classroom has worn carpets and concrete walls dotted with posters of past Mosaic productions like "Now That I Can Dance -- Motown 1962," the story of the Marvelettes. In this scene the Jubilee singers -- exhausted, hungry and dejected -- tell their unyielding mentor, George White, that they want to quit.

White is played by Sperling, Mosaic's charismatic founder, making a return to his roots as an actor. He's a short, boyish man of 41 with cropped brown hair and trimmed beard fading to gray.

"We've got one more engagement that we're obligated to do at Oberlin College," he says, rallying the troops during the scene. "Oberlin College was a main station on the underground railroad. They saved thousands of their colored brethren."

The cast during rehearsal of the play SING JUBILEE!  Photo by Romain Blanquart

"Sing Jubilee" grew out of Mosaic's relationship with OyamO, who had previously written "City in a Strait" for the company, exploring the civil rights movement in Detroit in the 1960s. When Sperling told OyamO that Mosaic was interested in a play about civil rights in the '50s, the playwright said, "I can write that, but what I really want to do is something on the Fisk Jubilee Singers."

A widely produced American playwright with roots in the Black Arts Movement of the '60s, OyamO had been asked by a Los Angeles production company in the 1990s to write a treatment for a musical based on the Jubilee Singers. He became enamored with the group's compelling story while doing historical research, the idea resonating with his lifelong fondness for black church music.

"I was 9 when my grandmother took me to a church conference and I was amazed at the power of the music," he says. "There was an old tottering lady who had to be helped to her chair, and all of a sudden she jumped up and ran around the church -- she ran over a deacon. My grandmother used to sing spirituals around the house, and I'd ask her to sing them again. She had this beautiful, flat Alabama voice."

The cast during rehearsal of the play SING JUBILEE!  Photo by Romain Blanquart

The Los Angeles project died on the vine, and the idea lay dormant until the Mosaic commission. The script hews close to history, though some details have been altered for dramatic expediency.

The confrontation with the mob in the train station, for example, is fundamentally true, though the choir sang hymns rather than a spiritual. Still, the choir's ability to tame hostile Southerners made George White even more determined to take the singers North, according to Ward's history.

Spirituals began by slaves
Negro spirituals emerged in the early 19th Century during segregated Christian worship (camp meetings) by Southern slaves. The songs were improvisatory and often built in call-and-response patterns, with texts from sources ranging from scraps of scripture to original inventions.

There were sorrow songs like "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," jubilee shouts like "Joshua fit de battle of Jericho" and signal songs like "Steal Away to Jesus" that were coded messages in which transcendence stood for the freedom of the North.

The cast during rehearsal of the play SING JUBILEE!  Photo by Romain Blanquart

As Erick Lichte points out in the liner notes to "Deep River," a recording of spirituals by the group Cantus, the spiritual was replaced by gospel music in black churches during the 20th Century, leaving the tradition mostly in the hands of classical singers and choral groups..

The emotional power comes from their stark poignancy, their transformation of pain into hope and their affirmation of shared cultural values -- an early example of what the cultural critic Albert Murray once called "Stomping the Blues."

"Spirituals for me are healing for the soul," says Andrew Cox, 17, of Detroit, who plays one of the Jubilee Singers. "I can be in the worst mood and then when I sing these songs they brighten my day."

For the Mosaic actors, performing "Sing Jubilee" has been a living history course. Doing research to prepare for their roles, the students came face-to-face with the reality of slavery in a way that was new to them.

"At school we learn that slavery is bad, but I never really thought much about what it actually meant to people's lives," says Aja Dier, 18, of Detroit. "Now it's less about facts than emotions."

Dier also feels there's kinship between the Jubilee Singers and the Mosaic Youth Theatre, though she knows nothing can compare to the hardship faced by the newly freed slaves in the 1870s. "But they were artists trying to make a name for themselves and that's what we do in Mosaic," she says. "We're bettering ourselves."

'Sing Jubilee'
Mosaic Youth Theatre
8 p.m. Fri., Sat., May 16-17; 4 p.m. Sun. and May 18
Detroit Film Theatre at the Detroit Institute of Arts
5200 Woodward, Detroit
313-833-4005
www.mosaicdetroit.org
$20, $12 seniors and ages 6-17;
Sundays: $10, $6 seniors and ages 6-17

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