Today I join in celebrating my friend Dr. Paul Kwami, who made his transition two years ago. Paul Kwami was former Director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers for 27 years. Although I’m not present in Nashville to honor him today, I reflect on our shared triumphs by introducing new audiences to experience concerts held by the historic Fisk Jubilee Singers.
Some years ago, in Harlem’s Apollo Theater, I watched 1,400 middle-school students remain enraptured by the beauty of the songs flowing from the Fisk Jubilee Singers – young Black people, clothed in understated elegance, displaying the power and alure of Negro Spirituals and early work and slave songs. Their haunting melodies, birthed by enslaved Africans, were planted as fertile seeds for music that would become known as the Blues, Gospel, and Jazz and universally acknowledged as original American music. This was a sonic experience oddly familiar to the tender young ears perched listening, bemused, there in New York’s citadel of Hip Hop, R&B and the music of the day.
Dr. Paul Kwami always helped to smoothly orchestrate a powerful musical and historical experience from behind the curtain, whether within schools, universities, or renowned concert halls, from New York’s Carnegie Hall to the most elite venues around the world.
We were fortunate to bring the Jubilee Singers to central Harlem’s Langston Hughes Theater at the Schomberg Center for the Study and Research of Black History and Culture in Harlem, as well as to historic churches such as the Abyssinian Baptist Church and the Riverside Church in Manhattan. And we extended their performances into Brooklyn at the iconic Plymouth Baptist Church, once pastored by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s revered abolitionist uncle, where the modern iteration of the Jubilee Singers returned in 2012 after more than 130 years had passed since first being welcomed before an all-white congregation during the early days of the nation’s Reconstruction era.
Many plaudits and awards would ensue and be bestowed in coming years upon the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and as I reflect on my tenure as President of the New York, New Jersey Fisk Alumni Club, I am grateful for the aid and assistance from Pfizer Cooperation to bring the Singers to New York City and its metropolitan area. Many who may never have heard nor likely to have encountered an opportunity to see or hear the Singers were able to glean insight into the very foundations of American modern music as largely influenced by contributions of groups like theirs.
So today I reflect on a bond of friendship with Dr. Kwami, and have gratitude that the State of New York and the great City of New York rightly responded to his work with the Fisk Jubilee Singers by issuing Proclamations declaring Fisk Jubilee Day in March 2005.
