Swing Low Sweet Chariot

Swing Low Sweet Chariot Lyrics. A profoundly important African American spiritual, generally credited to Wallis Willis, a Choctaw freedman living in the Choctaw Nation in what is now southeastern Oklahoma, sometime before 1862. It reached wider audiences in the 1870s through the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, whose touring performances of spirituals like this one first carried the genre to American and international concert audiences. Many historians believe its imagery of a chariot “coming to carry me home” carried a second, coded meaning tied to the Underground Railroad and the hope of freedom, alongside its plainer spiritual meaning of crossing over to a better world — though, like much of this oral tradition, the exact intent behind it was never written down and remains genuinely debated among historians. Its slow, swaying melody has given it a gentle, cradle-like quality ever since. Here you will find the lyrics, meaning, and chords.