Members of the Jubilee Voices ensemble perform in Arlington. The group was founded by a Washington Revels singer in 2010, and combines song, dance and words to share the artistic expression of enslaved African Americans. Photo by Elizabeth Fulford/Washington Revels

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For the vocal ensemble “Jubilee Voices” — one of several vocal groups that comprise the Washington Revels — singing is much more than artistic expression. It’s a way to honor the 12 to 15 singers’ African American ancestors and preserve stories rarely told. 

For the vocalists’ enslaved ancestors, singing was a “life force that sustained a people,” said Andrea Jones Blackford, who founded Jubilee Voices in 2010 and is its director. Based in the D.C. area, the group performs a unique blend of singing, dancing and spoken word.  

Singing field songs, work songs and what came to be called “spirituals” made bondage easier to bear, provided comfort and offered some relief in a hostile world.  

Songs also became a form of protest, and a secret means of communication, especially for people trying to escape slavery.  

When abolitionist Harriet Tubman sang, “Steal away to Jesus, steal away home, I ain’t got long to stay here,” she was sending a message to the slaves she was about to rescue: “We’re leaving tonight!”  

When her brothers were about to be sold south, Tubman sang to reassure them that she was on her way to help: “The old ship of Zion is coming.”   

Blackford was part of the nonprofit Washington Revels that established Jubilee Voices when the former planned their Civil War sesquicentennial in 2011. The Washington Revels wanted to recognize the people on the home front, not just soldiers, and the uniquely American forms of music created by enslaved people.  

While the group chooses songs associated with enslaved people, today its repertoire also includes music from the post-Civil War period and the 20th-century Civil Rights Movement. 

Themes of hope and more

Threaded through the ensemble’s music are themes of persistence, determination, sorrow, hope, redemption, struggle and the quest for freedom.  

Songs feature lyrics such as “There’ll be peace in that land where I’m bound. There’ll be joy,” and “I stepped in the water. The water was cold. It chilled my body but not my soul.”  

The concerts often end with the spiritual “In That Great Gittin’ Up Mornin’,” which assures that “There’s a better day a-coming; fare thee well.” 

Jubilee Voices performs most of their songs a cappella, that is, without instruments. “We sing a cappella so we can go with our feelings,” explained Dr. Jacqueline Berry, a retired doctor who has been with the group for a dozen years. 

“Each time we sing, it comes out differently because of what we’re feeling at that time. And we feel the spirits of our ancestors. We go with what we feel.”  

Drums, banjos, chants

For some songs, musicians accompany the group on a drum or banjo.  

The West African drum, called a djembe, has a hollow wooden body with animal skin stretched over the top. Drummers play it with their hands and fingers. The banjo also has West African antecedents. 

  Some of the music performed can be traced to the shouts, hollers, spirituals and chants of the antebellum period. Many of the songs come from the 1867 book Songs of the Slaves, 136 songs compiled by three northern abolitionists: William Francis Allen, Lucy McKim Garrison and Charles Pickard Ware.  

This trio transcribed the music of the Gullah Geechee people of Saint Helena Island, South Carolina, who were newly freed slaves living in a refugee camp. The songbook is the first published collection of African American music of any kind.  

Jubilee Voices also performs what’s called the “ring shout,” a form of worship likely indigenous to Africa, in which one person stands in the center of a circle with a stick as others circle around, clapping and patting their feet rhythmically.  

They do some dances, like the buzzard lope, created by the Gullah people on Sea Island. The dancer portrays a buzzard circling its meal as singers chant, “Throw me anywhere, Lord, in that old field,” a song popularized by Bessie Jones, a Gullah Geechee woman. 

 “It’s important to tell the story of people who have endured. The legacy of African Americans in this country is evident in all that we say and do. There’s no shame in that,” Blackford said. 

Much of that history has been ignored or distorted, she pointed out, citing as examples the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when white attackers destroyed the city’s Black Wall Street, as well as the largely forgotten story of how the U.S. Colored Troops turned the tide of the Civil War.  

“The time is now to tell our ancestors’ stories, not just Black people’s stories. It is America’s story. We cannot understand our history until we understand all of it,” Blackford said. 

Chief storyteller, star singer

One of the group’s star singers is baritone Jim Harkless, 93, who’s been with the group since its beginning.  

A retired, Harvard-trained lawyer who lives in Montgomery Village, Harkless was a labor arbitrator for more than 50 years. Singing is far less stressful than labor law, he quipped.  

“It’s good for the brain. It makes you feel better,” Harkless said. 

Berry saluted him and said, “He’s our griot [oral historian]. He knows everything about everything.”   

On why she sings, Berry said, “Medicine is my vocation, but music is my passion. When the Angel of Death comes, she can take my stethoscope, but not my music.” 

Jubilee Voices perform 10 to 12 concerts a year in the D.C. area, many of them free.