170. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

The Story Behind the Hymn

This spiritual is traditionally attributed, at least in part, to Wallis Willis, a Choctaw freedman — a formerly enslaved person of African descent who had lived among the Choctaw Nation, in what is now Oklahoma. That nation, controversially, held enslaved Black people among its own members during this period of American history.

Willis is believed to have composed or significantly shaped the song sometime before the American Civil War. As with most African American spirituals passed down through oral tradition, though, the exact history of its original composition cannot be established with full certainty.

The spiritual’s central image of a ‘chariot’ coming to carry the singer ‘home’ draws directly on the biblical account of the prophet Elijah being taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot, in 2 Kings 2:11. Its reference to ‘Jordan’ evokes the biblical Jordan River, which the Israelites crossed to enter the promised land.

Scholars of African American religious music widely understand both images to have functioned on a double level for the enslaved communities who first sang them. They were genuine expressions of hope for heaven and death’s release from earthly suffering. But for at least some singers, in some specific historical contexts, they also functioned as coded language referring to escape from slavery itself — with ‘home’ potentially signifying not only heaven, but freedom in the American North or in Canada.

The spiritual first reached wide public attention beyond Black church and community settings through performances by the Fisk Jubilee Singers — a touring vocal ensemble formed by students at Fisk University, a historically Black university in Nashville, Tennessee.

They performed the spiritual and others like it across the United States and Europe, beginning in the 1870s, specifically to raise funds for their financially struggling university — introducing this and other African American spirituals to international audiences who had never previously encountered them.

The spiritual has remained one of the most widely recognized and frequently performed African American spirituals in the world. It is sung across an extraordinary range of contexts, from formal choral concerts to popular music recordings to international sporting events.

Its origins in the specific historical experience of American slavery are now known to a global audience considerably larger than the small enslaved Choctaw Nation community where it likely first took shape.