A New Song from the House of Bondage

In 1871, nine young Black students from Fisk University in Nashville set out on a desperate fundraising tour to save their struggling school. They had almost nothing — threadbare clothes, empty pockets, and a repertoire of spirituals that most of America had never heard sung on a concert stage. These were the songs their parents and grandparents had whispered in fields and bellowed in brush arbors, forged in the furnace of slavery.…