HOW A BLACK SLAVE SPIRITUAL BECAME SPORTING ANTHEM
The singing of SwingLow,SweetChariot as an emotive chorus by supporters at England games has been criticised as an ‘unfortunate’ act by American scholars, writes Andrew Keh
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.
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.”
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.
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. She said she only recently read about the song’s use in England, and called it “unfortunate”.
“Such cross-cultural appropriations of US slave songs betray a total lack of understanding of the historical context in which those songs were created by the American slave,” she said.
Thousands are likely to belt it out this today, when England play Scotland in London.
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.
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.
Dudley Wood, the former secretary of the Rugby Football Union, was quoted in The Inde
pendent 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.”
Two years later, the same newspaper devoted an edition of its mail-in reader question-and-answer column to the question of why the chant took hold. In response, one reader wrote, “It was often sung by a white crowd when black players were playing well — a backhanded compliment in my view.” Another called it “slightly racist but in the best possible taste”.
In the United States, the song was first formally published as a written text in the 1870s, appearing in songbooks for the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, a black choir that put on singing tours throughout the United States and Europe. Such concerts, presumably, first carried black spirituals to wider audiences overseas. By the early 20th century, Swing Low was becoming popular among the all-male choirs of Wales.
In the 1950s, at the same time that slave-era spirituals were having a re-awakening as part of the US civil rights movement, Swing Low,
Sweet Chariot was becoming a popular drinking song in the rugby clubs and pubs of Britain, where the lyrics were often accompanied by a series of bawdy gestures.
“It was sung after club matches, particularly if people had a few beers and are being sociable and having a singsong,” said Richard Woodley, 46, an England fan from Newark, in Nottinghamshire, who played rugby in his youth.
The song’s move in England from the bar room to the biggest stage of professional rugby changed its nature further still. After its spontaneous appearance in the Twickenham stands, it persisted, taking on a life of its own, and eventually the Rugby Football Union, the governing body for the sport in England, embraced it as a central component of its marketing. Before the 1991 World Cup, the England players participated in a jazzy promotional version called Swing Low (Run With The Ball).
The rugby union later commissioned UB40 — the reggae-pop band famous for “Red Red Wine” — to record another version of the song before the 2003 World Cup. When England won, the song rushed up the charts. Two years ago, in a news release announcing a new version of the song by the English singer Ella Eyre, a union official said, “Owned by the fans, Swing
Low, Sweet Chariot is a song that is unique to England Rugby and has the power to instill a sense of hope and drive England teams forward when it’s sung at Twickenham.”
Sponsors joined in, too. In 2003, after England won the World Cup in Australia, British Airways noted in a news release that the “appropriately named Sweet Chariot 747 came to carry the victorious England team home.” More recently, BMW built similar marketing campaigns around the conceit that its cars were “Sweet Chariots”.
“It’s really the song of England rugby,” said Josh Rice, 25, a fan from Nottingham.
BLACK AMERICAN HERITAGE
Arthur Jones, a music history professor and founder of the Spiritual Project at the University of Denver, said the situation reminded him of US 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.
“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.”
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 University 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.”
Indeed, before the game against France, it seemed few England fans knew the song’s origins, even though the issue had momentarily bubbled up in the English news media in 2015. First, a columnist for The Telegraph asked, “Is it time England kicked their rugby anthem into touch?” A few months later, a writer for the
Independent published an essay titled “Why it’s time for England to stop singing Swing Low,
Sweet Chariot.” Both noted the song’s solemn origins as a slave spiritual.
But Williams laughed when asked if those pieces reflected a larger debate occurring in the rugby community. “The typical crowd that goes to watch the English national rugby team is not likely to be an audience that’s going to think hard about these types of questions or spend much time worrying about political correctness,” he said.
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 re-appropriated 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.”
That moving and morphing does not end. At the beginning of the 2010-11 English football season, Arsene Wenger, the longtime manager of Arsenal, criticised Stoke City for employing physical tactics that he said were more reminiscent of rugby than soccer. Stoke fans took the comments personally. Months later, when Arsenal visited Stoke City — for a game Stoke would go on to win — the home fans sang Swing Low, Sweet Chariot again and again, in a sort of gleeful conceptual taunt.
They, too, adopted the song as their own, and they continue to sing it to this day. ©2017 THE NEW YORK TIMES