Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

The story

"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" was probably composed sometime after 1865 by Wallace Willis and his daughter Minerva Willis, Choctaw Freedmen living in the old Indian Territory, near Hugo in what is now Choctaw County, Oklahoma. Willis may have been inspired by the sight of the Red River, beside which he was labouring, which reminded him of the Jordan and of the prophet Elijah taken up to heaven in a chariot (2 Kings 2:11). Alexander Reid, a minister at the Old Spencer Academy, a Choctaw boarding school, heard Willis sing it and "Steal Away", wrote down the words and melodies, and sent them to the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University in Nashville. Performances by the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Hampton Singers on tours of the United States and Europe made it widely known in the late 19th century.

The song is typical of the spiritual: a pentatonic melody, heavy repetition and a call and response in which a leader sings the changing lines and the congregation answers with the refrain, a form that draws on African musical heritage and is still common in African American churches. Sung without instruments, it was open to improvisation meant to bring singers and listeners into ecstatic communion with the Holy Spirit. Some sources claim that this song and "Steal Away" referred in code to the Underground Railroad, the network that helped people escape slavery in the South for the North and Canada. The historian Charshee Charlotte Lawrence McIntyre argued that spirituals used recurring figures with double meanings, through which enslaved people could speak of hope, freedom and escape under their captors' eyes; in this song the Jordan has been read as the first step to freedom, home as Africa and Jesus as anyone who helped the enslaved to freedom. No such reading can be proved.

The earliest known recording was made in 1894 by the Standard Quartette. The Fisk University Jubilee Quartet's recording for Victor on 1 December 1909 became the first gospel song to sell a million copies. In 1939 Nazi Germany's Reich Music Examination Office listed the song among "undesired and harmful" works. It returned in the civil rights struggle and the folk revival of the 1960s; Joan Baez sang it at Woodstock in 1969. In 2002 the Library of Congress placed the Fisk Jubilee Singers' recording in the National Recording Registry, and in 2011 Governor Mary Fallin signed a bill on 5 May making it Oklahoma's official state gospel song.

English rugby players and fans have sung the song for decades, often with gestures. The folk singer Joe Stead claimed he brought it to rugby clubs around 1960 after hearing it from Paul Robeson, and a 1966 Tatler article described it being sung at a Twickenham bar. Footage from 1987 shows the Twickenham crowd singing it for the winger Martin Offiah, nicknamed "Chariots". At England's 35–3 win over Ireland at Twickenham in 1988, after a long losing run, fans took it up during six second-half tries, and it became the England team's song, released as a single for the Rugby World Cups from 1991. In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Rugby Football Union said it was reviewing fans' use of the song. Brian Moore and Prince Harry argued it should no longer be sung at matches; Martin Offiah said it should be kept as a chance to teach fans about racial discrimination and Black history.

What it says

A spiritual of hope in the face of death: the singer looks across the Jordan to the chariot that will carry him home to heaven, as Elijah was carried, and turns to the listener who may get there first. Death is met as the end of earthly suffering and the way to rest. The mood is calm, longing and confident.

The words