A hush fell over Ryman Auditorium, Nashville’s “Mother Church of Country Music.” On the same stage where Hank Williams wailed “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and Patsy Cline wondered if she might be crazy, nine young African American singers entered from the wings, their voices blending in a mesmerizing, almost whispering rendition of the timeless slave song “Steal Away.”
“The trumpet sounds within my soul,” they sang, and you could almost hear that horn, muted and mournful. “I ain’t got long to stay here.”
On that night last fall, the Fisk Jubilee Singers—founded 151 years ago to raise money for the South’s oldest historically Black university—took hold of 2,000 hearts and, almost instantaneously, squeezed them to the
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