December 18, 2024 - Good Morning! It’s Wednesday, December 18.
Welcome back to our holiday series “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. Today we focus on the story behind a beloved Christmas spiritual, “Go Tell it on the Mountain”.
In 1866, right after the end of the Civil War, a college was founded in Nashville, Tennessee called Fisk University. It provided an education for those who had recently become freedmen and freedwomen. Fisk is among a number of these kinds of schools that still exist today - Spelman University in Atlanta, Howard in Washington D.C., Xavier in New Orleans - just to name a few.
Fisk University struggled financially, as many new schools do, and so in 1871, its president formed a choir, the Jubilee Singers, a group that was designed not only to enrich the arts, but also to raise funds for the college. That first year the singers toured America and Europe - singing for Queen Victoria, Mark Twain, and Ulysses S. Grant - and raised $50,000. That’s equal to a million dollars today!
In those early days at Fisk, another musical tradition was begun as well, a very special holiday tradition. On Christmas Day, just after sunrise, groups of students would walk from building to building on campus, singing the spiritual “Go Tell it on the Mountain”. Imagine being awakened by that sound! A sound that echoed the voices of their ancestors who had no church buildings, who congregated in the open air to sing their praise to God. To sing songs like this . . .
Go, tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere
Go, tell it on the mountain that Jesus Christ is borne
Down in a lowly manger the humble Christ was born
And God sent us salvation that blessed Christmas morn
Go, tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere
Go, tell it on the mountain that Jesus Christ is born!
Meet you back here tomorrow,
David
cindertex50@yahoo.com
