My Soundtrack for Uncle Tom's Cabin

I'll always remember the first time I heard "Ezekiel Saw the Wheel". I was nineteen and living with my grandparents for the summer. My grandfather was dying of cancer and I wanted to be near him for the last few months of his life. I stayed in the guest bedroom on one end of their mobile home. Though small, the room was clean and comfortable. My grandmother's antique bed, which had belonged to her mother, took up most of the space. I had to turn sideways to get in. It was spread with a bleached-white quilt and had springs.

One hot night, I was sitting cross-legged on the bed, cross-stitching a sampler by lamplight. The window was open. Some classical music was playing softly on the radio...

It was an ordinary moment -- and then, quite suddenly, it was an extra-ordinary moment. Over the radio came a recording of an African American choir singing a spiritual a cappella. It was "Ezekial Saw the Wheel". Even now, seventeen years later, the experience of hearing this song for the first time is still vivid in my mind.

How can I describe it?  Haunting. Soul-stirring. Deep. (Who can say what it means?)
I jumped out of that big springy bed and turned up the volume, then stood transfixed until the last bit of harmony faded to silence.

I made a mental note to purchase the CD, but I never did.
Until a few weeks ago.

As I was preparing to start Uncle Tom's Cabin, I was thinking about how moving African American choral music is and how I wish I could find that one song that made the hair stand on the back of my neck so long ago.

So I consulted my crystal ball  did a quick search online. (Don't you just love how you can listen to samples of songs before you buy music nowadays?) And...

I found it!!!

Not only does this disc have my beloved "Ezekiel Saw The Wheel" it's loaded with other spiritual gems:

From inside the Smithsonian Folkways cover: "African Americans moved out of slavery into freedom with the story of their journey wrapped in the songs they sang."

What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world. ~ W.E.B. DuBois

Inside the cover: a picture of the Fisk Jubilee Singers

The songs in this recording were first popularized by the Fisk Jubilee Singers during the Reconstruction years. In an effort to raise funds for their struggling school, the singers went on a tour of northern cities with the songs they had brought with them out of slavery. "They did not view this sacred repertoire as concert material. It spoke with an inside voice that they could understand."

I did not, when a slave, fully understand the deep meaning of those crude and apparently incoherent songs. I was, myself, within the circle, so that I could then neither hear nor see as those without might see and hear. They breathe the prayer and complaint of souls overflowing with bitterest anguish. ~ Fredrick Douglass

Some of the songs on the recording such as "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot", "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho" and "Deep River" are very familiar. Others are not so well known, but every bit as moving. "Listen to the Lambs" and "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" are down right heart-wrenching. Several others, such as "There is a Balm in Gilead", "Everytime I Feel the Spirit", and -- one of my new favorites -- "Ain't Got Time to Die", send an upbeat, encouraging message. "Steal Away" and "Wade in the Water" are songs which had double meanings for fugitives headed for freedom on the Underground Railroad.The yearning for freedom is present in every song on the disc, but especially pronounced in "Oh Freedom".

Ride for Liberty -- The Fugitive Slaves, by Eastman Johnson
image credit

After a while the singing commenced, to the evident delight of all present...as they sung, some laughed, and some cried, and some clapped hands, or shook hands rejoicingly with each other, as if they had fairly gained the other side of the river. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

Listen to samples HERE.