John Wesley Work Jr. Grave

Publisher: Go Tell It on the Mountain

The fact that we sing “Go Tell It on the Mountain” every Christmas is really a credit to the tenacity of John Wesley Work Jr., a former professor of Latin, Greek, and History at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. In fact, C. Michael Hawn says bluntly:

“’Go, tell it on the mountain’ provides the opportunity to tell the story of how singing African American spirituals saved a university.” (History of Hymns: “Go, Tell it On the Mountain”)

John was born in Nashville on August 6, 1873, to John and Samuella Work; John’s father, John Sr., was a former slave and a choir director at his local church. John Jr. (or, as some historians call him, John II) was brought up to love both music and a classical education; he eventually enrolled at Fisk and majored in history and Latin (B.A. 1895 and M.S. 1898). After further education at Harvard, he returned to Fisk as a professor of Greek and Latin until 1906 when he was appointed chair of the department. During his time at Fisk, he was also heavily involved in the music program, eventually directing “The Fisk Jubilee Singers” (drawing their name from Leviticus 25 – the year of jubilee), a ten-member touring ensemble used to raise funds for debt-ridden Fisk University and to promote the beauty and legacy of negro spirituals.

“In 1865, barely six months after the end of the Civil War and just two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, three men — John Ogden, the Reverend Erastus Milo Cravath, and the Reverend Edward P. Smith — established the Fisk School in Nashville.

The school was named in honor of General Clinton B. Fisk of the Tennessee Freedmen’s Bureau, who provided the new institution with facilities in former Union Army barracks near the present site of Nashville’s Union Station. In these facilities Fisk convened its first classes on January 9, 1866. The first students ranged in age from seven to seventy but shared common experiences of slavery and poverty — and an extraordinary thirst for learning.” (www.fisk.edu/about/history)

John Jr. remained a faculty member and part of the administration until 1923 when he resigned to become president of Roger Williams University, also in Nashville. RWU ceased operations in 1929 due to financial problems compounded by the stock market crash that same year. The school was eventually merged with Howe Institute (today LeMoyne–Owen College), another historically black college and faith-based institution.

To say that John Jr. “resigned” from Fisk University is somewhat of a euphemism. While a member of the faculty and administration, John (along with his brother, Frederick) were heavily involved in the preservation of the slave songs and negro spirituals of yesteryear. There were two avenues John Jr. attempted to do so. One was though the ministry and fundraising of the award-winning Fisk Jubilee Singers:

“On November 16, 1871, a group of unknown singers — all but two former slaves and many still in their teens — arrived at Oberlin College in Ohio to perform before a national convention of ministers. After a few standard ballads the chorus sang spirituals and other songs associated with slavery. It was one of the first public performances of the secret music African Americans sang in the fields and behind closed doors for generations.

‘All of a sudden, there was no talking,’ says musicologist and former Jubilee Singers Musical Director Horace C. Boyer. ‘They said you could hear the soft weeping…and I’m sure that the Jubilee Singers were joining them in tears, because sometimes when you think about what you are singing, particularly if you believe it, you can’t help but be moved.’” (www.fiskjubileesingers.org/the-music)

The group left campus on October 6, 1871, for an eighteen-month fundraising tour, taking with them the entire contents of the University treasury for their travel expenses. The trip was ultimately successful and is the reason the school celebrates “Jubilee Day” every October 6. Since that first concert, the Fisk Jubilee Singers have been inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame (2000), won a Dove Award (2004), and earned a spot on the Music City Walk of Fame (2006). In 2008, they were recipients of the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest honor for artists and patrons of the arts.

The second avenue was through the printed word. John Jr. joined with his wife and brother to publish the slave songs and negro spirituals of their ancestors. The fruit of their labor was the publishing of the New Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers (1901) and New Jubilee Songs and Folk Songs of the American Negro (1907). It was the second book that included the first publication of “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”

Sadly, the administration at that time did not share John Jr.’s passion for the preservation and performance of the negro spiritual.

“There is nothing sadder in the tragic history of human souls than those years from 1915 to 1923 when at Fisk University the soul was slowly being crushed out of John Work … And why? There was no why, there was only suspicion, dislike, innuendo and cold disapproval in the seats of power. The new administration at Fisk and the Music Department redoubled their fight against the jubilee song … Caught in the whirlpool, he struggled dizzily on. He was displaced from his position of leader in music, from his headship of the department of Latin and History, and people, even Southern whites, put in his and other colored teachers’ places.” (Lynn Abbot and Doug Sheroff, To Do This, You Must Know How, 2013)

The spiritual “Go Tell It on the Mountain” was not authored by John Jr. but was the product of generations of slaves who found it more encouraging and satisfying to shout joyfully than to give in to the misery of their status in life. “Like many of the spirituals of the period, which emerged from people whom logic might say should be complaining, ‘Go Tell It…’ refocuses one’s life upon the miraculous instead. Is life unfair, even miserable? That’s what a slave might have more logically vocalized. Perhaps John had re-discovered that logic has nothing to do with Him and His appearance.” (David Cain, “Go Tell It On the Mountain — John Wesley Work, Jr.”, 2019)

John Wesley Work Jr. passed into eternity on September 7, 1925, and is buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Nashville, Tennessee. Inscribed on his non-descript grave marker are the words “Be thou faithful unto death and I will give you a crown of life.” Apt words for one of God’s faithful servants!