The John Wesley Work Home

John Wesley Work III was born in Tullahoma in 1901, earned his bachelor's degree at Fisk in 1923 and taught there from 1927 until 1966, directing the Jubilee Singers from 1947 to 1956. In the summers of 1941 and 1942 he joined Charles S. Johnson and Lewis Jones in a joint Fisk and Library of Congress field study in Coahoma County, Mississippi; Muddy Waters was first recorded in that project. His cantata The Singers won a national composers' prize in 1946. His mother, Agnes Haynes Work, was a singer who helped train the Fisk group.

What the plaque says

The John Wesley Work Home (Obverse): In 1937 this Victorian-style house became the home of John W. Work III. A teacher and composer for 39 years, he served his alma mater by enriching the Fisk musical traditions. Director of the Jubilee Singers, Work III, a serious composer, completed more than 100 compositions. He was not only an acclaimed composer and choral conductor, but also a recognized author, educator, and ethnomusicologist. (Reverse): His father, John W. Work II, composer of the Fisk alma mater, "The Gold and Blue," was known as the rescuer and preservationist of Negro religious music. Work II's book, Folk Songs of the American Negro, was one of the first extensive studies on the origin and development of religious African-American music by a descendant of an ex-slave who lived during the time many of the songs had their beginnings.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — steps away
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.
• Tennessee State Capitol — 1.1 mi
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 1.3 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• National Museum of African American Music — 1.5 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.

More markers nearby

• Charles Spurgeon Johnson / Robert E. Park — steps away
• Fisk Jubilee Singers — steps away
• Fisk Memorial Chapel — steps away
• Jubilee Hall — steps away