George Pullen Jackson


George Pullen Jackson was an American educator and musicologist. He was a pioneer in the field of Southern hymnody. He was responsible for popularizing the term "white spirituals" to describe the "fasola" singing.

Early life

George Pullen Jackson was born in 1874 in Monson, Maine. He graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1902. While in college, he was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. He received a Bachelor of Philosophy in 1904 and a PhD in 1911 from the University of Chicago.

Career

Jackson was an Assistant Professor of German at the University of South Dakota in the 1910s. By the 1930s, he had joined the faculty at his alma mater, Vanderbilt University. He was also a music critic for the Nashville Banner, and the president and manager of the Nashville Symphony Society.
Jackson argued that Tennesseans in the Antebellum South were "far more musically active" than after the war. He added that many people used to attend singing schools, and he blamed the lack of musical training on the radio, which discouraged people from learning to sing in the postbellum era.
Additionally, Jackson argued that Negro spirituals took their origin from poor whites who sang old folk songs from England.
During the 1940s, he studied the roots of anabaptist music. He proposed the now generally accepted view that the original tunes used in Der Ausbund hymnal were popular medieval melodies.Der Ausbund is still used by Amish groups and has the distinction of being the hymnal with a history of the longest continual use.

Works