Steal Away: A Song History
“Steal Away,” often printed as “Steal Away to Jesus,” is an African American spiritual; Hymnary.org’s hymnal index names no composer for it.[1] The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture attributes it, along with “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” to Wallace Willis, who was enslaved in the Choctaw Nation and sang with his daughter Minerva; their enslaver hired them out to Spencer Academy, a Choctaw boys’ school, where superintendent Alexander Reid came to know their songs.[2] By that account, Reid taught six of the Willis songs to the touring Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1871, and they became standard repertoire for the group in America and Europe.[2] The entry draws on Reid’s 1884 obituary of Willis in The Fisk Herald, and notes that recent research showed Wallace and Minerva were father and daughter, not husband and wife as long assumed.[2]
Worthington Whittredge, The Camp Meeting, oil on canvas, 1874. Shown for its subject, an American religious gathering; it has no connection to the song.
“Steal away” was among the 24 songs in Jubilee Songs, as Sung by the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, published in New York by Biglow & Main with an 1872 copyright.[3] The song is often said to have carried a hidden call to escape, but a National Park Service lesson presents such “coded spirituals” as something believed by some, and the sources consulted here offer no period evidence that it was used as a signal.[4] The Dinwiddie Colored Quartet recorded “Steal away” unaccompanied for Victor on October 29, 1902,[5] and the Fisk University Jubilee Singers recorded “Steal away to Jesus” for Columbia on October 21, 1915.[6]
Hymnary.org finds the tune in well over a hundred hymnals.[1] Maureen Sellers includes it in Simply Gospel, Book Two, a collection of 24 tunes arranged for solo mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[7]
Sources
- Hymnary.org: "STEAL AWAY".
- Oklahoma Historical Society, Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture: "Willis, 'Uncle' Wallace and 'Aunt' Minerva".
- Internet Archive: "Jubilee Songs: As Sung by the Jubilee Singers, of Fisk University".
- National Park Service: "Freedom Is Coming, Lesson 4".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix [Pre-matrix B-]1716. Steal away / Dinwiddie Colored Quartet".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Fisk University Jubilee Singers".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, Simply Gospel, Book Two".
- Image: Worthington Whittredge, The Camp Meeting, oil on canvas, 1874. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.