Swing Low, Sweet Chariot: how an American slave hymn became the anthem of English rugby
Believe it or not, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot doesn’t have its origins in a filthy rugby jersey and a pitcher of beer.
The song is commonly sung at England rugby games, especially at Twickenham, but the RFU are now considering whether or not to ban it, amid concerns about its history. “Carry Them Home” has already been dumped as a slogan by the RFU.
The song was originally composed, it’s believed, by a slave named Wallace Wallis in the 19th century, and it’s regarded as a “negro spiritual”, a Christian hymn that combines spiritual belief with the hardships of daily life as a slave in antebellum America.
As a result, the lyrics “Sweet chariot / Coming for to carry me home” symbolise less victory over an opponent, and more the sweet release of death. There have long been theories that the song features coded lyrics as well, designed to lead slaves to the mythical Underground Railroad. Since its earliest days, it has also been associated with funerals within the black community.
As Gareth May wrote in The Telegraph in 2015, the differences between an early 20th-century recording of the song and a typical rugby-match version are stark. One is pleading and spiritual, something that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Coen Brothers film, while the one you’ll hear at Twickenham is clearly more celebratory.
It was long believed that the use of the song at English rugby matches stemmed from a 1988 game between Twickenham and Ireland, when a group of schoolboys from Douai School began singing it to the black player Chris Oti after he scored a rapid hat-trick. It’s unknown whether there was any racial intent to their choice of song, but the anthem was picked up by other members in the crowd.
Earlier this year, however, the World Rugby Museum pushed that dating back to 1987, unearthing footage of the song being sung at Twickenham when Martin Offiah was playing in a sevens match. His nickname was “Chariots”, a pun on the title of the film Chariots of Fire, released six years before.
Then there’s a related train of thought, which stretches further back: that the song has its rugby-related origins in the 1960s, when fans at the local level began to chant the song, accompanied by rude hand-gestures. The spread of the song around the English rugby scene would supposedly lead to the song being sufficiently well-known to be picked up at Twickenham decades later.
Neither theory has been explicitly confirmed, and the truth may be lost to time. But the song had fully caught on by the early 1990s, with the release of a remixed version of the song performed by England rugby players, titled Swing Low (Run With The Ball). A version by the reggae band UB40 was subsequently commissioned as the official song of England Rugby a year later.
Ella Eyre was the most recent singer to perform an official rendition of the track, recording the official England Rugby song in 2015. But it’s still regularly performed across the United States, where it retains its more spiritual underpinnings. Among the acts to sing the song in the past fifty years include Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Etta James. Beyoncé also performed the song in the 2003 gospel comedy The Fighting Temptations.
Although, amid Black Lives Matter protests, the song’s origins are back in the headlines, few people had, before 2020, explicitly argued that the song should be banned from English rugby games, and even fewer have called its performance “racist”.
But Arthur Jones, a music history professor and founder of the Spiritual Project at the University of Denver, told the New York Times in 2017 that it would be beneficial to all if the background to Swing Low, Sweet Chariot was better-known.
“I feel kind of sad,” Jones said. “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."
Swing Low Sweet Chariot
by Wallis Willis, circa 1895
Chorus:
Swing low, sweet chariot,
One interpretation of the song is that is about abolition and being rescued from slavery. In this case, “swing low” is a call for abolitionists to visit the southern United States, where slaves were being held.
Coming for to carry me home.
ie. A release from slavery and a return to family
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.
Verse 1
I looked over Jordan, what do I see,
A related interpretation is that the song informs escaped slaves on routes to take to freedom. There is a theory that a number of negro spirituals from this period were promoted by the abolitionists of the Underground Railroad.
In this case, the Jordan in scripture is the river crossed by the Israelites to reach the Promised Land; it could be that this is an instruction to cross the Red River of the South toward freedom.
Coming for to carry me home.
A band of angels coming after me,
Coming for to carry me home.
The most widely-recognised interpretation of Sweet Chariot is that the song is about death and a release from the cares and misery of this world. A “band of angels” coming to take the singer to Heaven.
Chorus:
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.
The modern British interpretation of this tune, as sung at Twickenham, has “home” as a metaphor for victory. The rugby association seems to have begun in the 1960s, when Sweet Chariot was used as a bawdy drinking song, accompanied with gestures.
It became strongly linked with the England team when it was sung en masse during the last game of the 1988 season at Twickenham. The context is that the team had managed just one try in the past two years, then suddenly scored six in the latter half of the game to snatch victory from Ireland.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.
Verse 2:
If you get back to heaven before I do
(Coming for to carry me home)
You'll tell all my friends, I'll be coming there too
(Coming for to carry me home)