Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

The spiritual is usually credited to Wallace Willis, who had been enslaved in the Choctaw Nation in the Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma, and to his daughter Minerva. The accounts put it in the late 1860s. Alexander Reid, a minister who ran a Choctaw boarding school, heard Willis sing it and sent it to the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University in Nashville, and the song was printed in 1872 in the book of the songs they sang. Some writers hear coded directions for the Underground Railroad in the words, and that reading is a theory rather than something the early sources say.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers had set out in 1871 to raise money for their school, and their tours of the North and of Europe are how most white audiences first heard spirituals sung. Swing Low was one of the songs they carried. The Standard Quartette recorded it in 1894, and the Fisk University Jubilee Quartet's record of 1909 is now in the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry. In England it has been the song of the rugby crowd at Twickenham since 1988, which is a long way from Oklahoma.

The chorus comes first, and it is two lines on almost the same notes, the second one starting higher. The verse drops onto repeated D's, a note for every syllable, and then borrows the chorus's own ending to come home. Bluegrass bands play it on three chords, D, G and A, the same sixteen bars under the chorus and the verse, and the Idaho Bluegrass Association notes that the progression is the one Amazing Grace and Foggy Mountain Top use.

On a mandolin in D the song goes lower than most, down to the A at the second fret of the G course, and every line of it dips there once. The rest sits on the open D course and the A course up to the B. It is mostly quarter notes and repeated eighths on one pitch, which makes it a good tune to learn a steady down, up on, and the three held notes that end the lines want a tremolo.