Swing Low, Sweet Chariot: A Song for Fathers' Day

I can't listen to Swing Low, Sweet Chariot without getting teary eyed.  When we were little, it was our lullabye.  My Dad would sing us to sleep, or at least calm us into sleepiness with the old Spiritual.  No Rock-a-Bye-Baby for us, we wuz sophisticated!

Like me, Dad was not gifted with a singing voice.  That didn't stop him from singing Swing Low, and two other favourites, Waltzing Matilda, and Molly Malone  (as in, cockles and mussles, alive, alive oh).  I think he found the lyrics in his thick, soft covered copy of the UBC Songbook.  It was about the size of a small bible, and filled with songs from the late 1940s and earlier.  On Summer nights, we kids and our neighbhourhood friends, would seranade anyone within earshot by loudly singing tunes from the book.

Choctaw Freedmen were Indigenous and Black freed slaves who were granted their freedom and citizenship within Choctaw Nation.  The African American Registry says that the hymn was written on December 21, 1840 by Wallis Willis, a black servant at the Spencer Academy, a Choctaw boarding school for Indigenous boys, along Oklahoma's Red River.  Uncle Wallace, and his wife, Minerva, often sang Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. 

Wallace and Minerva had come to Oklahoma from a plantation in Holly Springs, Mississippi.  Their owner, a half-Choctaw man named Brit Willis, brought them with him, when he left for the Trail of Tears, the route Indigenous people took when the US government ordered them to move to Oklahoma, and further West.

The school's Minister, Alexander Reid, transcribed the melody to music, and sent the sheet music to Nashville, Tennessee, where the Jubilee Singers made it a hit on their tour of the US and Europe.  Queen Victoria was visibly moved.

The song is thought of as a secret code for slaves escaping along the Underground Railroad.  The words "swing low, sweet chariot, comin' for to carry me home",  may mean the Underground Railroad coming into the slave States to take slaves to freedom in the North, and Canada. Then, "I looked over Jordan, and what did I see?  A band of angels comin' after me, comin' for to take me home", is thought to be code for, "workers with the Underground Railroad will cross the Ohio or Mississippi Rivers, and take me North, to freedom".

The freedom song was deemed, "undesired and harmful", by the White Supremacists of Hitler's Reich Music Examination Office.  It regained popularity in the US, during the civil rights movement of the '60s.  It is now considered one of the Songs of the Century, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Recording Industry Association of America.  It is also the Oklahoma State Gospel Song.
   

That this Spiritual would be one of my Dad's favourite songs, and one that he would choose to sing to his babies, is fitting.  He was a defender of civil rights all his life.  The first time I saw my Dad cry, was when Martin Luther King was assassinated. 

Fathers' Day is still hard, even after all these decades since my Dad's been gone.  Sometimes, I just wish he were here, for me to rest my head on his broad shoulders, and cry until his white shirt is sopping wet.  The chariot of angels came too soon.

 Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.