5 - The Spiritual in Australia: Practices, Discourse and Transformations, 1879–1950

Summary

Between 1886 and 1889, the renowned mixed vocal ensemble, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, of Tennessee, USA, toured Australia and New Zealand. The Singers’ concerts featured polished arrangements of spirituals, a unique African American form of religious folk song. These performances sparked a conversation about the boundaries of race and the transformative potential of the spiritual for those who embraced the genre within the Australian context. Over the century that followed, often but not always with the support of white missionaries, Indigenous groups employed the songs in various ways: as anthems of emancipation; to stir sympathy among white audiences; as a means of securing space on Australian concert stages and over the air, and to call out the Australian government’s racist policies. Hence, the Fisk Singers’ tour of Australia set into play both performance practices and discourses about the power of Westernising non-European music that fit easily within Australian assimilationist social ideology. Yet tensions would noticeably arise around the mid twentieth century between those who championed spiritual singing as a pathway to assimilation and touring African American recitalists such as Paul Robeson who viewed the cultural value of the songs in starkly different terms.