These spirituals also recall the reality of a life of punishing hardship that is an essential part of all of our history. Our senior choir sings the songs year round, because we love the expression of praise and worship of Christ, the sharing of a gospel, reflected in sweet poetry and lush melody. It was also included in “Songs of the Century” by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.īlack History Month is a great time to listen to and sing the spirituals, songs uniquely tied to the blood-soaked cotton fields of the plantations by a people bearing the terrible burden of iron chains, who looked heavenward - and northward - for salvation and freedom. In 2002, the Library of Congress honored it as one of 50 recordings added to the National Recording Registry. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was first recorded in December 1909 by the Fisk University Jubilee Quartet, a male foursome carrying on the legacy of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers. Reid, a white man, liked dem ones de best and he could play music and he helped grandfather to keep dese two songs.
He made up ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ and ‘Steal Away to Jesus.’ He made up lots more’n dem, but a Mr. My grandfather, Uncle Wallace, was a slave of the Wright (Willis) fam’ly when dey lived near Doaksville, and he and my grandmother would pass de time by singing while dey toiled away in de cotton fields. Reid heard the choir, he shared the songs he had heard Wallace and Minerva Willis sing. As Wallace’s grandson Frances Banks recalled in the WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives: Many of the spirituals we know today were preserved through the mission of the Fisk University Singers, who toured with the songs from 1871 to 1878. Just before the Civil War, he “loaned” Wallace and Minerva to work at Spencer Academy, a Choctaw boarding school near Fort Towson run by the Presbyterians, possibly to secure their safety.Īlexander Reid, a fierce antislavery pastor, was the superintendent of the school and took in the elderly couple, who spent many evenings singing Wallace’s songs for the school children, like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and “Steal Away.” The slaveowner soon oversaw a large plantation in Doaksville, near the present site of Hugo. But we know he walked the Choctaw Trail of Tears, following his master over 700 miles from Holly Springs, Mississippi to the “new Indian territory” in Oklahoma in the early 1830s.īritt Willis did well for himself in the new territory. We don’t know the trail that took him into slavery on a plantation in Mississippi. Wallace Willis knew too well the hard life of slavery, and its unique trials and tears. And sundown was a long way off” when Wallace saw the sun hit the nearby Red River and began singing. They worked in the fields from sun-up to sundown. Known for his sweet singing, Willis began a new song, inspired by Elijah and the Jordan River.īritt’s granddaughter, Jimmie Kirby, recalled the story, saying her mama remembered slaves “hoeing the long rows of cotton in the rich bottomland field. Wallace Willis and his wife Minerva, slaves of plantation owner Britt Willis, were hoeing cotton under the blazing hot sun in August 1840, when Willis looked up and saw the sun glinting off a nearby river. Unlike most spirituals, whose creators we don’t know, there is documentation about the creation of this popular spiritual recorded by artists ranging from Johnny Cash to B.B. “Jesus, get me out of this hot miserable field, off this plantation and home with you.”Īccording to the family lore, that is exactly how the song came about. “I know that’s right, come on chariot,” said one of my choir members during rehearsal. But as the last generation to pick cotton in rural Alabama, they knew the song was not so much about theology as it was about backbreaking toil of working the cotton field-and could imagine doing the work as a shackled slave.