How a slave spiritual became English rugby’s anthem

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.

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 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.

Thousands are likely to belt it out this Saturday, when England plays 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 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.”

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.”