Steal Away To Jesus

"Steal Away"
Page from The Jubilee Singers, 1873
Song by Fisk Jubilee Singers (earliest attested)
Written	Prior to 1862
Genre	Negro spiritual
Songwriter(s)	Wallace Willis

"Steal Away" ("Steal Away to Jesus") is an American Negro spiritual. 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.

"Steal Away" was composed by Wallace Willis, Choctaw freedman in the old Indian Territory, sometime before 1862.

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. The Jubilee Singers then popularized the songs during a tour of the United States and Europe.

"Steal Away" is a standard Gospel song, and is found in the hymnals of many Protestant denominations.

An arrangement of the song is included in the oratorio A Child of Our Time, first performed in 1944, by the classical composer Michael Tippett (1908–98).

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