Hymn of the Week: “Steal Away to Jesus”

Mahalia Jackson singing “Steal Away to Jesus” with Nat King Cole in 1957

The words and music of “Steal Away to Jesus” (WLP 804), were created by Wallace Willis, a slave who became a Choctaw freedman in Hugo, Oklahoma (now once again part of the reservation of the Choctaw Nation, thanks to the Supreme Court ruling of July 9, 2020). While the grandson of Wallace Willis recalled that his grandfather and grandmother sang many original songs, “Steal Away” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” are the most well known.

Alexander Reid, a minister at the Choctaw Boarding School, heard Willis and his wife Minerva singing in 1862 and transcribed the words and melody to this song and others. He eventually sent the music to the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, who popularized “Steal Away” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” among others, while on national and international tours.

The hymn can be interpreted as an expression of spiritual longing to be united with Jesus (in death) or as a coded message about the Underground Railroad and its promise of freedom from slavery. The song’s Biblical roots (Exodus 19:16-23) are powerfully relevant to either interpretation. Moses and the wandering in the desert are inextricably linked to many African American spirituals. Harriet Tubman, the great and courageous Underground Railroad conductor, who escaped slavery only to return over and over to the South to lead others to freedom, was known to her people as “Moses.”

The story of the Jubilee Singers and Fisk University is in itself a fascinating and moving testament to the perseverance of newly freed slaves and their dedication to higher education, including music. It is also a tale of the complicated relations between the races, sometimes helpful and, often, distressing and destructive.

Fisk University Jubilee Singers in the 1870’s

Fisk University was founded in 1865 after the Civil War with the express purpose of educating freed slaves, men and women, and its first classes included students from age seven to seventy. It was sponsored by the American Missionary Association, now the United Church of Christ, and maintains this affiliation today. When financial troubles overtook the university in 1871, Fisk’s treasurer and music director, George L. White, a white Northern missionary, gathered a nine-member student chorus, four black men and five black women, and a pianist, to go on tour. They took with them the entire contents of the University’s treasury for their travel expenses, hoping to earn much more.

The Fisk University website states: “Their performances so electrified audiences that they traveled throughout the United States and Europe, moving to tears audiences that included William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Ulysses S. Grant, William Gladstone, Mark Twain, Johann Strauss, and Queen Victoria.” Despite prejudice, ridicule and hardship (many hotels would refuse to house them even in the dead of winter, and these conditions ruined the health of some of the singers) ultimately they raised enough money to support the University and build Jubilee Hall, the South’s first permanent structure for the education of black students.

The name of the group is taken from Leviticus 25: 39-41 where it is written that in a Jubilee year, slaves were to be freed. The original Fisk Jubilee Singers intended the name as a potent symbol of the freedom of African Americans, one honored to this day. The Fisk Jubilee Singers continue to perform and tour, and they also observe a beautiful tradition on campus, as the Fisk Website describes: “To this day, each October 6, Fisk pauses to observe the anniversary of the singers' departure from campus in 1871. The contemporary Jubilee Singers perform in a University convocation — and conclude the day's ceremonies with a pilgrimage to the grave sites of the original singers, where once again, the old songs are sung at the burial places of their first performers.”

We all look forward to the day when we can gather at Epiphany and sing this wonderful spiritual and other sustaining hymns. In the meantime, the words to “Steal Away to Jesus” assure us that this current crisis will not last, and we can trust in the Lord to lead us through it to where we are meant to be.

“My Lord, he calls me; he calls me by the thunder. The trumpet sounds within my soul; I ain’t got long to stay here.”

Faithfully yours,

Mary Therese