{"id":1981,"date":"2013-08-06T23:13:21","date_gmt":"2013-08-07T03:13:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christmasclassics.com\/christmasmusic\/?p=1981"},"modified":"2013-09-10T14:48:11","modified_gmt":"2013-09-10T18:48:11","slug":"2nd-person-of-the-day-john-wesley-work-jr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/christmasclassics.com\/christmasmusic\/2nd-person-of-the-day-john-wesley-work-jr","title":{"rendered":"Christmas Classics PERSON OF THE DAY: John Wesley Work, Jr."},"content":{"rendered":"

Also on this day in 1871, John Wesley Work, Jr. was born in Nashville, Tennessee. Considered one of the first, if not the first, serious black collector of Negro folk songs, he too studied Latin and Greek, as well as history, and taught the two classic languages after he received a Master\u2019s degree from Fisk University in 1898.<\/p>\n

For the next twenty-five years Work Jr. became a leader in the effort to study and preserve Negro spirituals. At the same time he organized Fisk singing groups, and with the help of his wife Agnes and his brother Frederick Jerome Work, collected and published a number of collections of slave songs and spirituals. The first of these collections was New <\/em><\/strong>Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers<\/i><\/strong><\/span> (1901).<\/p>\n

Six years later he published, and may have composed, the remarkable spiritual\u00a0Go Tell It on the Mountain<\/b><\/em><\/span>, as part of New Jubilee Songs and Folk Songs of the American Negro<\/em><\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Many of the spirituals the Works collected had originally been sung by their forebears as they toiled in the fields, or at difficult manual labor, during the dark age \u00a0of slavery. It was one way of establishing relationships and feeling that God was near. The story of Christmas, of God’s Son being born as man to redeem and free man of his sins, was important in itself and as a symbol of hope in their quest for freedom<\/p>\n

The legacy of Negro spirituals was important to Work Jr. as he became both the leader and performer of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, the historic choral group founded in 1871 for the purpose of \u00a0raising funds for the post-Civil War black college whose severe financial problems almost shut the school down. The Jubilee Singers, who took their name from the year of freedom in the Bible, were quite successful on their tours of the United States and Europe, which included a bravo performance for Queen Victoria of England, and in the process they raised the Negro spiritual to an art form.<\/p>\n

For eighteen years Work Jr. served as leader of the Jubilee Singers until negative opinion set in at Fisk against the Negro spiritual as only a painful reminder of slavery. This groundswell of negative feelings toward black folk music forced Work Jr. to resign his leadership post in 1923. For the balance of his life, he served as president of Roger Williams University until his death on September 7, 1925.<\/p>\n

\"John<\/a>

John Wesley Work, Jr.<\/p><\/div>\n

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