“Steal Away” (“Steal Away to Jesus“) is an American Negro Spiritual. “Steal Away” the song is a standard gospel song, and is found in the hymnals of many Protestant denominations.The song is well known by variations of the chorus:
Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus!
Steal away, steal away home, I hain’t got long to stay here.
Songs such as “Steal Away to Jesus”, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, “Wade in the Water” and the “Gospel Train” are songs with hidden codes, not only about having faith in God, but containing hidden messages for slaves to run away on their own, or with the Underground Railroad. The lyrics of these songs indeed serving as code songs that conveyed plans to escape the yoke of bondage. The phrase “steal away” thus meant absconding; “Jesus” and “home” symbolized the yearned for freedom in the North; and the words “I ain’t got long to stay here” meant that flight northward was imminent.
“Steal Away” the song was composed by Wallace Willis, a slave of a Choctaw freedman in the old Indian Territory, sometime before 1862. Willis’ grandson recalls that his grandfather, “Uncle Wallace, was a slave of the Wright family when dey lived near Doaksville, and he and my grandmother would pass the time by singing while they toiled away in the cotton fields. Grandfather was a sweet singer. He made up songs and sung them. He made up ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ and ‘Steal Away to Jesus.’ He made up lots more of them, but a Mr. Reid, a white man, liked these the best and he could play music and he helped grandfather to keep these two songs.”
Alexander Reid, a minister at a Choctaw boarding school, heard Willis singing the songs and transcribed the words and melodies. He sent the music to the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. 1871, when the Jubilee singers first visited Newark, New Jersey, Rev. Alexander Reid happened to be there and heard them. The work of the Jubilee singers was new in the North and attracted considerable and very favourable attention.
When Prof. White, who had charge of them, announced several concerts to be given in different churches of the city he added, “We will have to repeat the Jubilee songs as we have no other.” When Mr. Reid was asked how he liked them he remarked, “Very well, but I have heard better ones.” When he had committed to writing a half dozen of the plantation songs he had heard “Wallace and Minerva” sing with so much delight at old Spencer Academy, he met Mr. White and his company in Brooklyn, New York, and spent an entire day rehearsing them. These new songs included, “Steal Away to Jesus,” “The Angels are Coming,” “I’m a Rolling,” and “Swing Low.” The Jubilee Singers then popularized the songs during a tour of the United States and Europe.
An arrangement of the song is included in the oratorio A Child of Our Time, first performed in 1944, by the classical composer Michael Tippet (1908–98). Many recordings of the song have been made including versions by Pat Boone and Nat King Cole.
