Page:The Story of the Jubilee Singers (7th).djvu/50

 concert in the Music Hall, in connection with the annual Methodist Reunion, Mr. Beecher wrote to a Boston friend: "They will charm any audience, sure; they make their mark by giving the 'spirituals' and plantation hymns as only they can sing them who know how to keep time to a master's whip. Our people have been delighted." And in a lecture which he delivered in Boston just before their coming Mr. Beecher took occasion to advise everybody to attend.

Dr. Cuyler wrote to the New York Tribune of their concert in his church, the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian, of Brooklyn: "I never saw a cultivated Brooklyn assemblage so moved and melted under the magnetism of music before. The wild melodies of these emancipated slaves touched the fount of tears, and grey-haired men wept like little children. Their wonderful skill was put to the severest test when they attempted 'Home, Sweet Home,' before auditors who had heard those same household words from the lips of Jenny Lind and Parepa. Yet these emancipated bond-women—now that they know what the word home signifies—rendered that dear old song with a power and pathos never surpassed. Allow me to bespeak a universal welcome through the North for these living representatives of the only true native school of American music. We have long enough had its coarse caricatures in corked faces; our people can now listen to the genuine soul-music of the slave cabins, before the Lord led His children 'out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage'!"