The Sea Islands of the
Carolinas, where they met, were filled with a black folk of
primitive type, touched and moulded less by the world about
them than any others outside the Black Belt. Their appear-
ance was uncouth, their language funny, but their hearts were
human and their singing stirred men with a mighty power.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson hastened to tell of these songs,
and Miss McKim and others urged upon the world their rare
beauty. But the world listened only half credulously until the
Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the slave songs so deeply into the
world's heart that it can never wholly forget them again.
There was once a blacksmith's son born at Cadiz, New
York, who in the changes of time taught school in Ohio and
helped defend Cincinnati from Kirby Smith. Then he fought at
Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and finally served in the
Freedmen's Bureau at Nashville. Here he formed a Sunday-
school class of black children in 1866, and sang with them
and taught them to sing. And then they taught him to sing, and
when once the glory of the Jubilee songs passed into the soul
of George L. White, he knew his life-work was to let those
Negroes sing to the world as they had sung to him.
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