 Historically, Negro colleges were the mechanism through which the spirituals were popularized. The travelling choirs of Negro institutions such as Hampton University, Wilberforce University, Fisk University and Tuskegee University performed the spirituals across the country as a means of raising funds for their respective institutions, all the while bringing to black and white audiences in the United States knowledge and appreciation of this indigenous musical form. Many of these university choirs also recorded compilations of Negro spirituals and published them. It was thus, as Locke has it, that the spirituals were able to avoid simply falling out of fashion and failing to survive “that critical period of disfavor in which any folk product is likely to be snuffed out by the false pride of the second-generation” (NN 202). This, by Locke's lights, is not an uncommon situation for folk arts to face, finding it necessary as they often do to resist being disavowed by subsequent generations wishing to distance themselves from the supposedly deficient quality of the folk expression.