A New Song That Crossed the Ocean

In October 1871, nine young singers — most of them former slaves — left Nashville, Tennessee with empty pockets and voices shaped by suffering. The Fisk Jubilee Singers set out to save their struggling university, and they carried with them the spirituals: songs their parents and grandparents had forged in the crucible of bondage, melodies that testified to a God who delivers.

At first, audiences did not know what to make of them. But when Ella Sheppard struck the opening chords and the ensemble lifted "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" into the silence of a concert hall, something extraordinary happened. Crowds wept. Critics marveled. Within two years, they stood before Queen Victoria in London, who reportedly said she had never heard anything so beautiful. They sang across England, Germany, and Switzerland. Their songs — born in cotton fields and whispered in slave quarters — now echoed through the grand halls of Europe.

The psalmist declares that the Lord "has done marvelous things" and calls all the earth to "burst into jubilant song." The Fisk Jubilee Singers lived that verse. Their new song was not invented in comfort but drawn from the deep well of God's faithfulness through generations of anguish. And just as Psalm 98 proclaims, that salvation song could not be contained by any border. When God does marvelous things, the music always finds its way to the ends of the earth.