Smithsonian - Public Domain

The brave college kids who saved the Negro spiritual

The end of Reconstruction can be chronicled by listening to the music of the era. Vann Newkirk, senior editor at The Atlantic, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who sang songs that evoked passion and heartbreak, and in doing so, saved an American art form. His article is “How the Negro Spiritual Changed American Popular Music– and America Itself.”