(MUSIC) The Original Norfolk Jubilee Singers from Norfolk Va

Sale 2503 - Lot 342

Price Realized: $ 750

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500

(MUSIC.) The Original Norfolk Jubilee Singers from Norfolk, Va., a Genuine Slave Band! Broadsheet poster, 2 pages, 20 x 11 inches; minor wear at edges and folds, 1-inch repaired closed tear in upper margin. Lowell, MA: Vox Populi Press, circa 1881

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This advertisement is stamped for a Wolfeboro Junction, NH, 24 February 1882. It features portraits of 6 unnamed African-American singers as well as their white manager, C.S. Dwinell. Undercutting the well-executed and respectful portraits of the singers is a large vignette showing slaves frolicking in a cotton field. The broadsheet features endorsements from two ministers, and promises "Southern songs of the old plantation, which for melody and harmony are unsurpassed." In response to the popular minstrel shows of the time, we are assured that these singers "are Genuine Colored People, Emancipated by President Lincoln's Great Proclamation of Freedom." On verso is a list of 90 songs in the group's repertoire.
The Norfolk Jubilee Singers followed in the success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who were founded in 1871. This advertisement boasts of the group's 11th annual tour, placing their founding circa 1871, although we find newspaper notices of their concerts no earlier than October 1878. They toured steadily through 1891, mostly in the northeast. Circa 1917, another group adopted the same name and found substantial success, recording and touring through 1940.