Spiritual Celebrity Series

The jazz staff at WGBH radio, Steve Charbonneau, Eric Jackson and Steve Schwartz, have started a blog and it's already filling up with items near and dear to my heart as well as illustrative of Celebrity Series history. Eric Jackson's post of November 29, "Say Amen Somebody!" (sorry can't link to it specifically, that's not part of their setup) sets up his December 12 Monday Night Spotlight broadcast, Jazz Goes to Church, which will feature "jazz versions of hymns, spirituals and Gospel music."

In the same post Eric talks about the Fisk Jubilee Singers (photo, above), which set off a synapse somewhere, so I opened our archives and sure enough, the Fisk University Jubilee Singers sang in Boston on Aaron Richmond's series (our founder's series, prescursor to the Celebrity Series) during the 1928-29 season. I also found that Mr. Richmond had presented other programs of spirituals in Boston: J. Rosamond Johnson (photo, right) and Taylor Gordon at the Copley Theatre in 1926 and 1928 and Paul Robeson in 1932.

Of course, a lot of other Celebrity Series concerts have featured great singers that sing spirituals; Marian Anderson, William Warfield and Leontyne Price, to name a few. But it isn't common knowledge that the great early practitioners found their way to Boston via the Celebrity Series, so I offer my thanks to Eric and the 'GBH blog for supplying the impetus to go find this history; at the very least, it feels good to have unearthed it. It's little journeys like these that make it worth the going.