Swing Low, Sweet Chariot: A Song History

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"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" is an African American spiritual credited to Wallace Willis. In the mid-1800s, Willis and Minerva Willis were enslaved in the old Choctaw Nation in what is now Oklahoma. Their enslaver was Britt Willis, a Choctaw man. From time to time they were hired out to Spencer Academy, a Choctaw school for boys. The boys there grew fond of the pair for the songs they sang while working, and in the evenings the two were sometimes asked to perform for them. Wallace composed his songs while working in the fields.[1] For many years the two were described as husband and wife. Research by R. B. Ward, published in 2022, found that they were in fact father and daughter.[1] The sources consulted here give no firm date for when the song was composed. Its central image comes from the story of the prophet Elijah, who is carried up to heaven in a chariot of fire (2 Kings 2:11). A note at Hymnary.org adds that the song also expressed enslaved people's hope of reaching freedom on the far side of a river.[2]

Studio group portrait of the nine original Fisk Jubilee Singers, men and women in formal 1870s dress

Jubilee Singers, Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn., cabinet-card photograph, negative by James Wallace Black, about 1872. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The song spread through Alexander Reid, a minister who became superintendent of Spencer Academy in 1849 and knew the Willises over the next twelve years. In 1871 Reid heard the Fisk Jubilee Singers perform in Newark, New Jersey. He then taught them six of the Willises' songs, this one among them, by writing out the words and singing each song to them until they had it memorized.[1] The Fisk group had been formed that same year by George L. White, Fisk University's treasurer and music teacher, to raise money for the debt-ridden school in Nashville. After touring the United States, they went to Europe in 1873, singing for Queen Victoria in Britain, and the profits of that tour paid for the construction of Jubilee Hall.[3] The song was printed in Jubilee Songs (Biglow & Main, 1872), a collection of the singers' repertoire with the music written down by Theodore F. Seward.[4]

Fisk singers recorded the song in 1909. In 2002 the Library of Congress added that recording to the National Recording Registry, crediting it to the Fisk Jubilee Singers. The Library describes it as the group's first commercial recording and credits the singers with first bringing spirituals to white audiences, through both concerts and records.[5]

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Sources

  1. Oklahoma Historical Society, The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture: "Willis, Wallace and Minerva" (Judith Michener).
  2. Hymnary.org: "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot".
  3. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Fisk Jubilee Singers".
  4. Internet Archive: "Jubilee Songs: Complete" (Theodore F. Seward, Biglow & Main, 1872).
  5. Library of Congress, National Recording Registry: "2002".