10 March 1873 • Hartford, Conn. (Pike, 14–15, UCCL 00886)
Gentlemen:
The Jubilee Singers are to appear in London, &Ⓐemendation I am requested to say in their behalf what I know about them—& I most cheerfully do it.1explanatory note
I heard them sing once, & I would walk seven miles to hear them sing again.2explanatory note You will recognize that this is strong language for me to use, when you remember that I never was fond of pedestrianism, & got tired of walking, that Sunday afternoon, in twenty minutes, after making up my mind to see for myself & at my own leisure how much ground his grace the Duke of Bedford’s property covered.3explanatory note
I think these gentlemen & ladies make eloquent music—& what is as much to the point, they reproduce the true melody of the plantations, & are the only persons I ever heard accomplish this on the public platform. The so-called “negro minstrels” simply mis-represent the thing; I do not think they ever saw a plantation or ever heard a slave sing.
I was reared in the South, & my father owned slaves,4explanatory note & I do not know when anything has so moved me as did the plaintive melodies of the Jubilee Singers. It was the first time for twenty-five or thirty years that I had heard such songs, or heard them sung in the genuine old way—& it is a way, I think, that white people cannot imitate—& never can, for that matter, for one must have been a slave himself in order to feel what that life was & so convey the pathos of it in the music. Do not fail to hear the Jubilee Singers. I am very well satisfied that you will not regret it.
Mark Twain.Ⓐemendation
The Jubilee Singers of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, had undertaken an extended singing tour in 1871 to raise money for their school. The third year of their tour took them to Great Britain, where they performed from May 1873 until May 1874, raising nearly ten thousand pounds. According to their agent, Gustavus Pike, the eleven singers—eight of them former slaves—won acclaim for the “spiritual and religious power of the songs of the slaves of the South, and thus touched the hearts of the Christian people everywhere and secured their sympathy and liberal aid” (Pike, vi–viii, 31, 38, 193). Tom Hood, the editor of Fun, published extracts from Clemens’s letter on 26 April, explaining that it had been “brought over by the agent in advance” of the arrival of the Jubilee Singers (Hood 1873). Several other prominent men supplied similar endorsements, including Henry Ward Beecher and George MacDonald (Pike, 13). Pike retained the letter and published it in his account of the 1873–74 tour. Clemens probably addressed his letter to the Routledges, as well as to Hood, to increase its chances for publication. Perhaps he hoped they would print it in their magazine, the Broadway—which, however, ceased publication in early 1873.
It is not known for certain when Clemens first heard the Jubilee Singers, but it may have been on the afternoon of 28 January 1872, when they performed at a Sunday school concert at Joseph Twichell’s Asylum Hill Congregational Church and, according to the Hartford Courant, created “a sensation rarely equalled”:
It is the first time that we at the north have heard the genuine songs of their race, executed with their faith and their feeling. It was like a revelation. ... One heard in those strange and plaintive melodies the sadness and the hope of a trusting and a really joyous race. (“The Jubilee Singers,” 29 Jan 72, 2)
Clemens had another opportunity to hear the singers in Hartford on 17 December 1872 (“Brief Mention,” Hartford Courant, 13 Dec 72, 2). In any case, it is certain that he heard them twice during his stay in England. Samuel C. Thompson recalled going with him to purchase tickets for one of their London concerts:
He felt in all his pockets and got the money. But just as the clerk was sweeping it into the drawer some one called out “Don’t take that money.” “Isn’t it the right amount?” said Clemens. “Isn’t this Mr. Clemens?” said the manager. “You can’t pay any money to go to this concert. Give him the best seats in the hall.” Going out Clemens explained that he had written an article in a London paper drawing attention to the fact that now the public would have an opportunity to compare the conventional “negro minstrels” with the genuine negroes of the South and their singing. After the concert Clemens said he had never before seen a cultured English audience so enthusiastic in applause. (Thompson, 85–86)
On 16 July Clemens heard the singers again at a private garden party (see 11 July 73 to Smith, n. 2click to open link). Nearly two years later, on 8 March 1875, Clemens recalled one of these London performances in a letter to Theodore F. Seward, then the Jubilee Singers’ musical director (“Mark Twain and the Jubilee Singers,” Boston Evening Journal, 13 Mar 75, 4, in Martin, 2–3):
Dear Sir—I am expecting to hear the Jubilee Singers to-night, for the fifth time (the reason it is not the fiftieth is because I have not had fifty opportunities), and I wish to ask a favor of them. I remember an afternoon in London, when their “John Brown’s Body” took a decorous, aristocratic English audience by surprise and threw them into a volcanic eruption of applause before they knew what they were about. I never saw anything finer than their enthusiasm. Now, John Brown is not in this evening’s programme; cannot it be added? It would set me down in London again for a minute or two, and at the same time save me the tedious sea voyage and the expense. I was glad of the triumph the Jubilee Singers achieved in England, for their music so well deserved such a result. Their success in this country is pretty well attested by the fact that there are already companies of imitators trying to ride into public favor by endeavoring to convey the impression that they are the original Jubilee Singers.
Clemens’s letter to Seward (UCCL 01205click to open link) is edited in L6 , pp. 406–8.
Sometime during his 1872 trip to England, Clemens had evidently accompanied Hood on a visit to Woburn Abbey, the principal seat of the duke of Bedford. The present duke, Francis Charles Hastings Russell (1819–91), had succeeded his cousin in May 1872. The house, built in 1747 on the foundations of a Cistercian abbey, was near the village of Woburn in Bedford County. Its sixty acres of gardens and pleasure grounds and thirty-five hundred acres of deer park, one of the largest in England, were open to the public (Burke 1904, 137–38; Murray, 459–60).
For Clemens’s recollections of the slaves his father owned, see Inds, 89, 104, 327, 346.
Pike, 14–15.
L5 , 315–17; Fun, 26 Apr 73, 172, excerpts. The letter was probably also printed in the first edition of Pike (London: 1874), but the editors were unable to examine a copy.