“Slave Songs of the United States,” which appeared in 1867, only two years after the end of the American Civil War, was the first significant anthology of what the African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, in his classic 1903 collection of essays “The Souls of Black Folk,” would call “sorrow songs.”
Most commonly, though, they’ve been called “Negro spirituals” or, increasingly, “African American spirituals” or just “spirituals.” The term derives from the King James translation of Ephesians 5:19, which speaks of “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,” and of “singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.” Although they reflect demonstrable African influence, they represent a uniquely American musical form; other New World regions where slavery was practiced, such as the Caribbean and Brazil, failed to produce similar songs.
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One of the most familiar of all spirituals is ”Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” (also known as “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore”). It seems to have been written down first on St. Helena Island, off the coast of South Carolina, during the Civil War. (The island had recently been seized from the Confederacy.) St. Helena is a center of the linguistically distinct African American “Gullah” culture that, incidentally, also produced the song “Kumbaya.” (“Kum Bah Yah” is “Come By Here” in Gullah creole.)
Although its lyrics vary widely from singer to singer, “Michael” will serve as a good example of typical “spiritual” themes and an intriguing point of entry into an important strand of the history of religion.
The song’s title and first line, “Michael row the boat ashore,” is already fascinating in its own right.
In ancient Greek mythology, Charon (or, more accurately, Kharon) was the ferryman of the dead. In the service of Hades, the god of the underworld, he transported newly deceased souls with his boat across the river Styx, which divides the land of the living from the realm of the dead. (Similar barriers, specifically including rivers, are recurrent motifs in near-death accounts, marking the point of no return from this world into the next.). The Greek term for Charon’s role, “psychopomp,” literally means “guide of souls.”
According to widespread Christian tradition, St. Michael the Archangel plays the part of psychopomp. As the anonymous medieval English homily “In Praise of St. Michael” (42.14) puts it, he “leads the soul of each and every true man through the gates of eternal life into the kingdom of heaven.”
In the various versions of the spiritual “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” the role of the classical River Styx is assumed by the biblical River Jordan, in which Jesus was baptized to show the path to heaven. Thus, it represents the transition from life to death, from earth to heaven:
Jordan’s River is deep and wide.
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Got a home on the other side.
Jordan’s river is deep and wide.
Meet my mother on the other side.
Jordan’s river is chilly and cold.
Chills the body, but not the soul.
Another notable illustration of such usage occurs in the famous song “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Strictly speaking, “Swing Low” isn’t an anonymous “slave song.” It was composed by a Choctaw freedman by the name of Wallis Willis in Oklahoma Indian territory sometime after the end of the Civil War in 1865. The nearby Red River seems to have reminded him not only of the Jordan River but also of the Prophet Elijah’s ascent into heaven in a chariot from the Jordan’s east bank, which is described in 2 Kings 2:1-18:
I looked over Jordan and what did I see,
Coming for to carry me home?
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A band of angels coming after me,
Coming for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.
But the Jordan River, over which the Israelites crossed into the Promised Land, symbolized not only postmortem salvation. Its use in these songs was political, as well as religious. For those who first sang “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” it also represented liberation from slavery — and perhaps particularly escape from the slaveholding South into the free states of the North. Some even see a coded reference to the Underground Railroad. (The 2019 film “Harriet” powerfully depicts such liberation, quite properly acknowledging the religious dimensions of the story.)
Many different artists have covered “Michael” since it was effectively rediscovered by white musicologists and performers around 1960. Here are three representative recordings:
• Joe and Eddie
• Pete Seeger
• Rufus Wainwright & Co.
Daniel Peterson teaches Arabic studies, founded BYU’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, directs MormonScholarsTestify.org, chairsinterpreterfoundation.org, blogs daily at patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson, and speaks only for himself.
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