Durham tenor accompanies Fisk singers

DURHAM -- Preston Wilson was in Ghana, far from his Durham home, as he slowly walked around Elmina Castle with other Fisk Jubilee Singers in summer 2007.

The Fisk University music education major was covering the same ground that African slaves did centuries ago, before a forced passage to America. The castle is now a Ghanaian national monument and museum, and Wilson was looking at displays detailing the horrific circumstances those men and women endured.

So, just moments before he and the other Jubilee Singers were set to perform, Wilson was on his knees crying.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers were in Cape Coast, Ghana, to perform during festivities celebrating that country's 50th year of independence and to record an album of Negro spirituals called "Sacred Journey."

Wilson has lent his tenor voice to the world-famous choir, known for singing the songs that came out of slavery and for establishing the Negro spiritual as a musical form, for the past three years.

In return, he helps harness the power of the Negro spiritual and passes it on to audiences around the world.

"We sing those songs for liberation and deliverance," Wilson says. "We all cried in Ghana. It was the hardest concert I've ever had to do. ... Standing in the same places our ancestors were beaten and raped and dragged and starved, we could feel all of that while singing those songs. ... I felt it kind of released our ancestors, for lack of a better word."

On Saturday, Wilson will be with the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who were formed 137 years ago, when they perform at the Herbert C. Young Community Center in Cary at 7:30 p.m. The concert will kick off the area's annual Martin Luther King Jr. Dreamfest.

"We like the idea of him doing what he likes to do," says his father, George Wilson, a former department head and longtime criminal justice professor at N.C. Central University. "And we're a Christian family, so we like the idea of him doing something with a spiritual base."

Wilson, 21, has been singing, "since he was conceived." He first sang in church when he was 5 years old. He began a more formal music education at Easley Elementary when he caught the attention of music teacher Jane Bruer.

Wilson wasn't hard to catch, singing all day whether he was doing school work or not.

"My parents would always get calls about me singing or talking at the wrong time, but Mrs. Bruer saw the gift in the midst of the disruptions," Wilson says.

Bruer eventually even asked Brenda Saunders-Hampden, a friend, to write arrangements for Wilson when he was in fourth and fifth grade.

It was quite a boost for Wilson. Sanders-Hampden, also a law professor at Seton Hall University, is a musician based out of Durham. She has performed with the likes of Marian Anderson, Dizzy Gillespie, Whitney Houston and Cicely Tyson.

"His love of music and my love of music created a bond which has lasted 16 years," says Bruer, who also taught Wilson as an eighth-grader before she moved to Githens. "He continues to be a mentor to my other students. I think the love of singing and the love of music is what sets him apart. He does what it takes and never complains about the work."

Sixth grade was a big year for Wilson. That year, he started at the Durham School of the Arts and began studying with Scott Hill.

And that's when he began dreaming of singing with the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

His mother, Zenobia Hatcher-Wilson, first dreamed that dream for herself as a soprano with the Livingstone College choir and later with community choirs in Newark, N.J., and Cincinnati.

When Preston was in sixth grade, Hatcher-Wilson gave him a book called Band of Angels that told the story of the Jubilee Singers. The group, founded in 1871, famously took to the road to perform and raise money to save their fledgling school, one of the first for slaves freed in 1863 by the Emancipation Proclamation.