How a Slave Spiritual Became Rugby’s Anthem
Une chanson américaine dans les stades européens.
Comment un morceau de musique religieuse né dans les champs de coton du sud des Etats-Unis a-t-il bien pu être adopté par les supporters de l’équipe de rugby d’Angleterre ? Pour bon nombre d’Américains, cette appropriation est déplacée et ils ne parviennent toujours pas à comprendre ce qui a bien pu se passer. Les Anglais eux-mêmes n’en sont pas sûrs… Un problème d’acculturation, peut-être ?
LONDON —Barely a minute had elapsed in the match between the national rugby teams of England and France when the song first boomed around the stands at Twickenham Stadium. “Swing low, sweet chariot,” thousands of fans sang, “coming for to carry me home.” It is a famous refrain and melody. For many in the United States, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” enjoys a hallowed status as one of the cherished of 19th-century African-American spirituals, its forlorn lyrics invoking the darkness of slavery and the sustained oppression of a race. 2.But here, across the Atlantic, the song has developed a parallel existence, unchanged in form but utterly different in function, as a boisterous drinking song turned sports anthem. “They start singing it when the game starts because they want everyone to get hyped up,” said Helen Weston, 53, an England fan at the France game on Feb. 4. “There’s nothing like hearing 80,000 people singing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.'”
A SURPRISE
3. To chart the song’s curious intercontinental transmutation — from mournful American slave-era tune to rousing English sports chant — is to understand the malleability of meaning in cultural objects as they move through space and time. In the United States, where rugby barely registers in the popular consciousness, learning about the song’s separate life abroad can result in a combination of surprise, disappointment and fascination.
4.Josephine Wright, a professor of music and black studies at the College of Wooster in Ohio, said the lyrics of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” allude to feelings of despair and a desire for release from suffering. In the 1800s, the song was a surreptitious alert on the Underground Railroad, as well as a funeral song, she said. Wright sang it with her family at the burial service of her mother in 1989. “Such cross-cultural appropriations of U.S. slave songs betray a total lack of understanding of the historical context in which those songs were created by the American slave,” she said.
1988
5. English fans first sang the song on a large scale at Twickenham Stadium on March 19, 1988, as England recorded a memorable comeback victory over Ireland. Multiple people and groups since then have claimed responsibility for starting the chant.
6.The motivation is a matter of some intrigue. Over the years, English newspaper articles mentioning the chant’s genesis that day matter-of-factly tied its emergence to the race of Chris Oti, who was the first black player to represent England’s rugby team in almost a century, and who played a starring role in that game.
7.Dudley Wood, the former secretary of the Rugby Football Union, was quoted in The Independent in 1991 as saying that Oti “was totally mobbed on the way to the dressing room. It’s a delicate situation in a way, in that it’s a Negro spiritual. But we poor English don’t really have the songs to sing.”
AWKWARD
8. Arthur Jones, a music history professor and founder of the Spiritual Project at the University of Denver, said the situation reUniversity minded him of U.S. sports teams who use Native American names and imagery, in that a group of people seemed to be free-associating with imagery largely disconnected from its history.
9.“My first reaction is absolute shock — and I actually understand it when I think about it — but that’s my first reaction,” Jones said. “I feel kind of sad. I feel like the story of American chattel slavery and this incredible cultural tradition, built up within a community of people who were victims and often seen as incapable of standing up for themselves, is such a powerful story that I want the whole world to know about it. But apparently not everyone does.”
10.When told about the awkwardness many Americans feel upon learning of the song’s repurposing, John M. Williams, the director of the Center for the Sociology of Sport at the of Leicester in England, said, “I can understand that, and the only thing I could give them as a kind of strange reassurance is that I suspect the vast majority of people singing it have no idea where it came from, or even that it’s American at all, or that it has a black American heritage.”
HISTORICAL AMNESIA
11. James W. Cook, a professor at the University of Michigan who has researched the early movement of African-American art and music into global markets, noted that the United States has long exported popular culture around the world, where its many forms then get appropriated and reappropriated in unusual ways. He said he found “historical amnesia” to be generally troubling, and suggested that more education about the song would be positive. But, he added, “When there’s any kind of boundary policing, that’s not a realistic understanding of how these cultural products move and adapt and morph as they move from place to place.”