Category: Fisk Jubilee Singers

  • The Sorrow Songs

    W.E.B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. It remains a classic in the fields of both sociology and African-American literature. Du Bois believed that there were ten “master songs” that defined the African diaspora in America, and, in a kind of meta-narrative, he prefaced each chapter of the book with a quotation…

  • Spirituals, Black English, and the Sonic Color Line

    Map of American English dialects. On July 5, 2018,  The Nation, a left-leaning magazine of politics and culture founded in 1865, published a poem on its website called “How-To.” The poem, meant to be an ironic critique of the limits of white liberal compassion, uses what is called in the field of linguistics African-American Vernacular English…