A New Song from the House of Bondage

In 1871, nine young Black students from Fisk University in Nashville set out on a desperate fundraising tour to save their struggling school. They had almost nothing — threadbare clothes, empty pockets, and a repertoire of spirituals that most of America had never heard sung on a concert stage. These were the songs their parents and grandparents had whispered in fields and bellowed in brush arbors, forged in the furnace of slavery.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers stood before white audiences in Ohio and New York and eventually before Queen Victoria herself, and they opened their mouths and sang. They sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" and "Go Down, Moses." They sang of deliverance not as abstract theology but as lived experience — the Red Sea parted, the chains broken, the Almighty bending low to hear the cries of His children.

Audiences wept. Mark Twain said their music was "the most moving thing I have ever heard." These former slaves and children of slaves were doing exactly what the psalmist commanded: singing a new song to the Lord, for He had done marvelous things. Their very freedom was the evidence.

Psalm 98 insists that when God acts in history — when His right hand wins the victory — the only fitting response is a song the world has never heard before. The Jubilee Singers understood this. Their new song was not new because the melody was unfamiliar. It was new because the people singing it were finally free.