242. Steal Away

The Story Behind the Hymn

"Steal Away" is most closely associated with Wallace Willis and his daughter Minerva, who were enslaved in the old Indian Territory — present-day Oklahoma — by a member of the Choctaw Nation, sometime before 1862. Alexander Reid, a minister who heard Wallace Willis singing it, wrote down the words and melody and later sent them on to the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Fisk University in Nashville, whose touring performances carried the spiritual to audiences across America and, eventually, Europe.

Like a number of spirituals from this period — "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," "Wade in the Water," and others — "Steal Away" has long been understood to carry a double meaning. On its surface, it is a hymn about death and heaven, a soul quietly slipping away to be with Jesus. Oral tradition, passed down through generations after emancipation, holds that it also functioned as a coded signal among enslaved people: "stealing away" described the secret religious gatherings held out of sight of overseers, and the song itself, sung at the right moment, could quietly announce that an escape — sometimes via the network later called the Underground Railroad — was about to happen. It is worth noting honestly that this coded reading rests on recollections gathered after the fact rather than on documents from the 1830s-1850s themselves, though the practice of using spirituals this way is well attested more broadly.

Whatever its precise use in any single moment, the song's imagery — thunder, lightning, bending trees, bursting tombstones — draws on apocalyptic language that would have been immediately familiar from the preaching and Scripture enslaved congregations knew well, casting an ordinary, urgent human longing for freedom in the same breath as a longing for heaven itself.

Preserved first through the Fisk Jubilee Singers and sung ever since in churches, concert halls, and classrooms, "Steal Away" remains one of the most recognized and most quietly powerful spirituals to survive from that era — a song whose full meaning was, by design, never meant to be entirely obvious to everyone listening.