Swing Low Sweet Chariot (Criticism)

Criticism

B. J. Bolden

B. J. Bolden is an Assistant Professor of English at Chicago State University, Chicago, IL. She is the managing editor of Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas at Chicago State University and the author of Urban Rage in Bronzeville: Social Commentary in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, 1945-1960. In the following essay, Bolden provides an overview of the themes and form of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” and explores the spiritual’s relation to African music.

The Negro spiritual is a religious folk song of African-American slave origin. In terms of formal classification, as Dr. Alain Locke noted in his essay “The Negro Spirituals,” they belong to a larger class of four song types that were common in the rural south during slavery: ritual prayer songs or spirituals; the free and spirited evangelical “shouts,” or camp-meeting songs; the more secular work and labor songs; and the folk ballad. The Negro spiritual may be likened to the folk ballad in its graphic narrative method and the strongly marked rhythm that is often apparent in the singing, clapping, and swaying of the participants. The spiritual is known for its enduring quality and beauty as well as the overwhelming emotional component that is visible in the epic intensity and the profound tragedy of the songs. In his essay “Of the Sorrow Songs,” W. E. B. Du Bois commented that in the Negro spiritual, the “soul of the black slave spoke to men” and that “by fateful chance the Negro folksong — the rhythmic cry of the slave — stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born on this side of the seas.” The assessments of Locke and Du Bois concerning the universal appeal of the Negro spirituals were confirmed by the worldwide acclaim and financial success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers whose artistic renditions of the spirituals, from 1871-1875, netted them $150,000 to build Fisk University.

Yet even in the face of the broad acceptance of the Negro spiritual, the question of origin continues to be the subject of critical scrutiny by folklorists, musicologists, and historians. In his well-known poem “O Black and Unknown Bards,” James Weldon Johnson asks: “Heart of what slave poured out such melody / As “Steal away to Jesus,” “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot?” In The Book of American Negro Spirituals, Johnson answers his own question: “The Spirituals are purely and solely the creation of the American Negro.... The Negro brought with him from Africa his native musical instinct and talent.” Contemporary discussions revolve around the issue of the extent to which the spirituals reflect patterns of African retentions versus the extent to which they reflect a mere refashioning of southern white thematic and stylistic devices. The answer is twofold: the Negro spiritual contains visible elements of the rhythms and chants of its African ancestry coupled with the melody and harmony of the southern American slavemaster’s religious music during and after the Civil War.

The Negro spiritual represents the most basic elements of the survival of African slaves transported to America, derived from the profound emotion emanating from a sorrowful, patient, long-suffering, hard-working, persistent, jubilant, creative, clever, and religious people who regularly emitted the plaintive cry of the wounded and entrapped. The songs illuminate the quality of a people who were metaphorical in their Biblical imagery, even under the harness of slavery, stoic in their vision of ultimate victory over imminent oppression, and clever in their ability to inject their songs with concealed messages of escape. In The Historical and Cultural Atlas of African Americans, Molefi K. Asante and Mark T. Mattson catalog the myriad creators of the spiritual who emanated from over 250 groups from various parts of the continent of Africa and were transplanted and enslaved in America. They include the Yoruba, Ibo, Hausa, Fulani, Akan, Ewe, Ga, Wolof, Touculeur, Mande, Sherbro, Luba, Kuba, Dan, Douala, Ibidio, and Edo.

Similar to Asante and Mattson’s assessment, specific African conventions have been noted in the Negro spiritual “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.” In Black Song: The Forge and the Flame, John Lovell, Jr. remarked on the presence of African musical transfers to Black American music, especially in the formal structure: the use of the pentatonic, hextatonic, and heptatonic scales; of lowered thirds, raised sixths, and lowered sevenths; of rhythm that dominates metrics; of scale that is ruled by song, rather than song ruled by scale; and, most significantly, the call and response pattern of a lead singer who positions the short choral phrase against the longer melodic line or refrain of a chorus.

For instance, the African convention of call and response is apparent in “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”: Leader: Swing low sweet chariot, Congregation: Comin’ for to carry me home. Leader: Swing low sweet chariot, Congregation: comin’ for to carry me home. Leader: I look over Jordan, what do I see? Congregation: Comin’ for to carry me home. Leader: A band of angels comin’ after me, Congregation: Comin’ for to carry me home.

Lovell and Mark Fisher both observed that “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” uses the same response and refrain structure as “The Story of Tangalimlibo,” a Bantu song from Rhodesia in south central Africa.

Like most Negro spirituals, “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” though deceptively simple in theme, content, and form, is thematically rich in its Christian references and signals the sense of victory over despair that was crucial to the physical, emotional, and psychological survival of the slave. The eschatological belief system or “other-world” theology that promises heavenly relief for those who faithfully endure the trials and tribulations of this world is apparent in the opening lines: “Swing low sweet chariot / Comin’ for to carry me home.” The chariot is the vessel that will transport the weary slave from the sordid world of enslavement to the beauty and freedom in the otherworld of heaven. The spiritual embodies the slave’s plaintive response to the alien conditions and experiences that he encountered in America — a new land, a new language, and a new religion — and is informed by his exposure to the Judeo-Christian biblical legacy. As the early African slaves merged into the American plantation system, the spirituals became the emotional release valve that permitted them to sing of their grief, sorrow, and pain. But the slaves were not without hope, and their songs reflect a deep religious commitment, the spirit of ultimate victory over despair and hope as a measure of their faith in transcending the bowels of slavery. As a reward to having braved their earthly enslavement, they looked forward to going to their heavenly home to live with God.

However, there are scholars who pose an alternate explication of Negro spirituals such as “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.” For instance, abolitionist and ex-slave Frederick Douglass was adamant in his view that the Negro spirituals were not limited to such simplistic Biblical interpretations, but, instead, were encoded with a secret language of escape. Based on that view, the second stanza of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” offers a vastly different interpretation:

I looked over Jordan, an’ what did I see, Comin’ for to carry me home, A band of angels comin after me, Comin’ for to carry me home.

In this view “home” would imply escape from slavery, and the “band of angels” would be representatives from Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad who would lead groups of slaves north to freedom. This message would be disseminated among slaves as a warning to anticipate escape. What in Biblical terms might be explained as the slave expressing a poignant sense of beauty, a deep religious feeling, and a deep longing for peace would, by contrast, be interpreted as a desperate longing for escape from slavery to freedom. Thus Douglass’ view of the language of Negro spirituals such as “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” dispels the myth of the contented slave whose religious fervor erased the pain of enslavement. As Du Bois wrote, “Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope — a faith in the ultimate justice of things.”

Source: B. J. Bolden, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1997.

What Do I Read Next?

• Alex Haley’s 1976 novel Roots presents the history of a black family from pre-slavery times up to the present. The sections concerning his slave ancestors are very vividly rendered and give the reader a good sense of what life in plantations was like for slaves.
• Poet, ambassador, and publisher James Weldon Johnson’s 1927 volume of poems, God’s Trombones, is written in the voice that a nineteenth-century preacher would use in addressing a congregation, but unlike the poet in “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” Johnson pointedly refuses to use dialect in spelling words, for reasons explained beautifully in the introduction. The history lesson to be gained from the introduction alone makes this book worth reading.
• W.E.B. du Bois was one of our country’s leading African-American intellectuals. His 1961 collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folks, is a landmark, written with grace and understanding.
• American Negro Slavery: A Modern Reader, edited by Allen Weinstein and Frank Otto Gatell and published in its second edition in 1973, is a collection of essays by historians that offers the reader one of the most complete and intelligent overviews ever compiled in one book about what it was like to be a slave.
• In Moses, Man of the Mountain, Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston’s 1939 novel (available in a 1991 reissue), the Biblical story of Moses is retold in the voice of a southern Negro, giving the reader a sense of this story’s importance to an enslaved people without addressing the relationship between the two cultures directly.