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Just my quick opinion on this topic :

The influence of the church is a variable which cannot be ignored in the historical equation that resulted in the blues. The church introduced an artificial split in the black music and dancing in which the secular and sacred had always been united, all part of one reality. The British hymns that came along with the evangelisation that was spread from the end of the 18th and especially since the beginning of the 19th century tried to appeal to the 'natural inclination' towards music within the black population, as it was perceived by the missionaries. However, the African characteristics remained an essential part – both in form and lyrics – of the black religious singing, which after 1850 became to be called 'spirituals'. The secular impact of the work songs (for instance corn shucking songs) did not disappear, even if the white population tried to control more and more the black 'components' of the religious singing (particularly after the Nat Turner rebellion which scared the hell out of the white population, which interpreted the 'black' religious singing as a vehicle of rebellion.
The blues has inherited this artificial split between the secular and sacred, which are IMO only two sides of the same medallion.

As for the Fisk Jubilee Singers, they were an exponent of what happened after the Emancipation. The black population was left to its own with no real society of its own. It had to rebuild everything. The middle class black group took the white population as a reference. It is in this frame that the Fisk Jubilee Singers need to be seen.

Indeed, once the African-Americans were freed as slave, the Reconstruction Period witnessed the popularity of the jubilee companies, groups of a Capella black singers who mostly had their social roots in the middle-class and black colleges. Some of them did some intensive touring, bringing them even on the international scene. The most famous are the Fisk Jubilee Singers that considerable contributed to funds raising for the Fisk University. Their repertoire was mainly spirituals, but also songs by the ‘Father of American Music’, Stephen Foster. Even though the aim of the jubilee groups was to offer a counterweight for the negative stereotypes that were promoted by the minstrelsy, they failed to build upon the culture that had grown on the fields and in the shacks. Their popularity was derived from a firm grounding of their style in the vocal harmonies of the European culture: university Jubilee groups presented folk material in a Western classical idiom by relying on cultivated voices and formal performance practices, thus bridging the gap between “art” and “folk” realms. There was no indication of the promotion of the richness of the musical culture that had grown on the plantations.
The same can be said of Polk Miller, who is the first white person who aimed at reviving the older black music forms in an authentic manner. As the son of a plantation owner, he learned how to play the banjo from his father’s slaves. His career started out as a pharmacist, but turned to music in 1892, billing himself (without a black face !) as the “The Old Virginia Plantation Negro” . He toured with “The Old South Quartette”, a changing group of black vocalists. Their repertoire was black and white spirituals, coon songs, confederate war anthems (a capella or with banjo accompaniment). (Scott Wilkinson, 1998). His popularity however didn’t go without concessions to the constraints imposed upon him by the white population: it is said that he stopped from performing because he feared for the safety of his black musicians, who were sometimes even forced to perform behind a curtain, leaving Miller alone visible on stage.
In total respect for the achievements of Polk Miller, one cannot ignore the nostalgic perfume that surrounds his work and music. ” The show aimed at pure nostalgia, as seen in a 1910 brochure emphasizing that the Old South Quartette were “genuine” Negroes: “Their singing is not the kind that has been heard by the students from ‘colored universities,’ who dress in pigeon-tailed coats, patent leather shoes, white shirt fronds, and who are advertised to sing plantation melodies but do not. They do not try to let you see how nearly a Negro can act the white man while parading in a dark skin, but they dress, act, and sing like the real Southern darkey in his ‘workin’’ clothes. As to their voices, they are the sweet, though uncultivated, result of nature, producing a harmony unequalled by the professionals, and because it is natural, goes straight to the hearts of the people. To the old Southerner, it will be ‘Sounds from the old home of long ago’. . . . To hear them is to live again your boyhood days down on the farm.” (program brochure quoted on http://jasobrecht.com/polk-miller-and-his-...uartette-1910/) . The premise of his show was that he was the judge of the real African American Culture. It is hard to put the suspicion aside that pure nostalgia about the old, ante-bellum social order, was not far away.

Just my thoughts….