The New Song That Saved a School

In the autumn of 1871, nine young Black singers left Nashville, Tennessee, with almost nothing — no money, no reputation, and a school on the verge of closing its doors. The Fisk Jubilee Singers were former slaves and children of slaves, students at Fisk University, a fledgling institution that could not pay its bills. Their director, George White, gambled everything on a concert tour north.

At first, audiences barely came. The singers slept in train stations and went hungry. But when they began performing the spirituals they had learned in bondage — songs their parents had sung in cotton fields and on auction blocks — something shifted. Audiences wept. Standing ovations followed. Within two years, they stood before Queen Victoria in London, and she reportedly declared she had never heard anything so beautiful.

These were songs forged in chains, yet they carried an unmistakable joy — the deep, defiant joy of people who believed God had not forgotten them. "Sing to the Lord a new song," the psalmist declares, "for He has done marvelous things." The Fisk Jubilee Singers understood this in their bones. Their new song was not new because the melody was unfamiliar. It was new because it proclaimed what seemed impossible: that the God who parts seas and topples empires had remembered the lowly, and His salvation had reached every shore.

Psalm 98 invites us into the same chorus — not polished performance, but the raw, grateful praise of those who have witnessed the Almighty's faithfulness with their own eyes.