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Thomas P. Fenner (November 22, 1829-October 15, 1912) was a musician, editor, and compiler of African American spirituals. He performed with a band in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He trained a group from Hampton Institute and toured with them following a fundraising model the Fisk Jubilee Singers used. The tours were fundraisers and he compiled and arranged spirituals from the singers, many of whom had been enslaved, that were published. Updated editions followed.

Early life and military career

Thomas Putnam Fenner was born on November 22, 1829 in Providence, Rhode Island. He was named after his ancestor, Major Thomas Fenner (1652-1718), who is also the namesake of the Thomas Fenner House historic site in Cranston, Rhode Island. He was only 12 or 13 years old when he married Sabra H. Dyer in 1842. They had two daughters. While in his late teenage year he served in the United States Cavalry during the Mexican–American War (1846-1848).

Frisell possessed a fine tenor voice and was an accomplished violinist in addition to being proficient on multiple other musical instruments. When the American Civil War began in 1861 he joined the Union army, and due to his skills as a musician he was primarily employed as as an instrumentalist in a military band. However, he died spend some time fighting on the battlefield and for a portion of the war was stationed at the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Rhode Island.

Music educator in Rhode Island

After the civil war ended in 1865, multiple sources claim Fenner aided Eben Tourjee in founding the New England Conservatory of Music in Providence, Rhode Island. However, scholar Lori Shipley in her 2011 article "Music Education at Hampton Institute, 1868–1913" published in the Journal of Historical Research in Music Education corrects an error in the historical account on this point. Fenner did establish a school with Tourjee, but it was not the New England Conservatory which was established in Boston, Massachusetts in 1867. In 1859 Fenner and Tourjee co-founded the Providence Academy and Musical Institute (PAMI) in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. When Tourjee left that school to start the New England Conservatory, Fenner remained in his teaching post at the PAMI and was not part of the establishment of the music school in Boston.

Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute

In 1868, former Union Army general Samuel C. Armstrong founded the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (often called the Hampton Institute historically, and now Hampton University) as a school specifically for African Americans. Armstrong believed strongly in the benefit of communal singing, and believed that the singing spirituals could instill a sense of cultural pride in his students. As such, from the beginning all students were required to participate in weekly communal singing classes regardless of their field of study, and were required to sing daily prayers and sing at multiple mandatory church services.

Fisk University was a similar black college founded after the civil war, and it too had a strong affinity with music education. When the Fisk school started experiencing financial problems, the Fisk Jubilee Singers (FJS) was formed as a means of raising money for the institution. It had tremendously successful national tour in 1871 which raised funds to keep the school open. The Hampton Institute was also experiencing financial problems, and Armstrong decided to form a touring choir, the Hampton Singers, modeled after the FJS. In order to achieve this, he knew he needed to hire a professional music educator to lead the choir. After contacting Tourjee at the New England Conservatory about suitable candidates for the job, Fenner was hired away from his position at the PAMI in June 1872 to join the teaching staff at Hampton as the first director of the Hampton Singers (originally called the Hampton Jubilee Singers).

In order to establish the Hampton Singers, Fenner and Armstrong traveled throughout Virginia and North Carolina, auditioning singers at schools and individuals they found working in the fields. Together they selected 17 singers, thirteen of which were former slaves. Because of the larger number of former slaves in the choir, the Hampton Singers gained a reputation for having a different and more authentic sound when it came to performing spirituals and plantation songs; maintaining what one writer of the period described as the "pathos and wail" heard on the plantations when those songs originated. Fenner encouraged the maintaining of this sound in these songs, but simultaneously trained his singers in European classical vocal technique and literature; shaping a choir with unusual flexibility and success in a range of vocal technique and repertoire that encompassed works in multiple languages and musical periods.

Fenner was not only a choral conductor at the Hampton Institute, but was the school's founding director of its music department which he continued to lead into the late 1880s. His concert tours with the Hampton Singers were financially profitable for the school; enough so that profits from their concerts alone paid for the construction of the Virginia Hall, the first dormitory for women at the Hampton Institute, and was responsible for stabling the school's finances overall so that it could remain open. Lori Shipley stated,

"Not only did the tours of the Jubilee Singers and the Hampton Singers provide funds to keep their respective schools active, but these schools were responsible for producing black teachers for black schools. If the choirs had not brought in enough funds to help keep the normal schools open, there would have been few teachers for black schools and the educational system for black students at the time might have been in jeopardy."

In working with the Hampton Singers, Fenner along with Armstrong realized that the art of African American spirituals and plantation songs was in danger of being lost as it was not written down, and many former slaves were reluctant to continue singing these songs. Believing that they had cultural value and deserved to be preserved, Fenner began to systematically collect African American songs with the intent of publishing them. However, he struggled to find a way to notate these songs in an authentic way, as the authentic performance practices of these songs often involved improvisation in the harmonies and were never performed exactly the same way twice. The songs he collected, along with his colleagues Bessie Cleaveland and Frederic G. Rathbun, were published in the anthology Cabin and Plantation Songs : As Sung By the Hampton Students. It was first published in 1874, and was later reprinted in 1891 and 1901 in an expanded version which added many spirituals and other African American songs originally collected by African American song collector Robert Hannibal Hamilton. Hamilton, a former slave, was one of the original singers in the Hampton Singers and went on to become the first black music teacher at the Hampton Institute.

Later life

Later he taught at Temple Grove Seminary in Saratoga, New York. He also taught at the New England Conservatory. He married Sabra H. Dyer and they had two daughters. He returned to Hampton after his wife died in 1898.

References

Citations

1. ^ Shipley 2011, p. 104.
2. ^ Frissell 1912, p. 684. sfn error: no target: CITEREFFrissell1912 (help)
3. Rhode Island Historical Society 1911, p. 38.
4. Harlan et al. 1972, p. 45.
5. Graham 2022, Innovators, Imitators, and a Jubilee Industry: From Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry.
6. ^ Shipley 2011, p. 105.
7. Shipley 2011, p. 103.
8. Shipley 2011, p. 104-105.
9. ^ Shipley 2011, p. 106.
10. Webb 2002, p. 102.
11. "Hampton Choir to Sing in Boston". Bay State Banner. March 12, 1970.
12. ^ Shipley 2011, p. 108-109.
13. Shipley 2011, p. 109.
14. Wright 2016, p. 419. sfn error: no target: CITEREFWright2016 (help)
15. Shipley 2011, p. 111.

Bibliography

• Frissell, Hollis B., ed. (December 1912). "Thomas Putnam Fenner" (PDF). The Southern Workman. 41: 682-686.
• Graham, Sandra Jean (2022). "Innovators, Imitators, and a Jubilee Industry: From Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry". In Matheson, Laurie (ed.). Music in Black American Life, 1600-1945: A University of Illinois Press Anthology, Volume 1. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 9780252053580.
• Harlan, Louis R.; Daniel, Pete; Kaufman, Stuart B.; Smock, Raymond W.; Welt, William M., eds. (1972). Booker T. Washington Papers, Volume 2: 1860-89. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 9780252002434.
• Rhode Island Historical Society (1911). "Points of Historical Interest in the State of Rhode Island". Rhode Island Education Circulars Historical Series. Vol. V. Rhode Island Department of Education.
• Shipley, Lori (April 2011). "Music Education at Hampton Institute, 1868-1913". Journal of Historical Research in Music Education. 32 (2): 96–121.
• Webb, Vaughan (2002). "Why don't you rock my soul". Virginia Cavalcade. 51 (3): 100–111.
• Wright, Josephine (Fall 2006). "SONGS OF REMEMBRANCE". The Journal of African American History. 91 (4). University of Chicago Press: 413–424.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: year (link)

See also

• Arthur Fenner

External links

• "Thomas P Fenner 1829-1912". The Fenner Family Tree.
• Cleaveland, Bessie; Rathbun, Frederic G.; Fenner, Thomas P. (1901). Cabin and Plantation Songs: As Sung by the Hampton Students. Arranged by Bessie Cleaveland, Frederic G. Rathbun, and Thomas P. Fenner, Musical Instructors at The Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute of Virginia, Third Edition. G.P. Putnam's Sons.

• Pending AfC submissions
• Pending AfC submissions in article space
• AfC submissions by date/18 November 2024