Swing Low Sweet Chariot: England Rugby's Anthem Explained

Wallace Willis was a freedman in Indian Territory, in what is now south-eastern Oklahoma, and he almost certainly never heard of rugby. He is the man usually credited with the song that eighty thousand people sing at Twickenham on a Saturday in February. Between those two facts sits about a hundred and sixty years, a Nashville university choir, a royal audience in London, a rugby club bar culture with filthy hand actions, and a governing body that had to work out in 2020 what to do about all of it.

The Rugby Football Union did not ban the song. That is the short answer to the question most people arrive with. The longer answer involves how a piece of American religious music from the era of slavery became the property of an English crowd, why the standard origin story is probably wrong in its details, and what it means that a stadium in south-west London sings it without, in most cases, knowing any of this.

A spiritual from Indian Territory, and the man credited with it

The attribution runs through Alexander Reid, a Presbyterian minister who worked at the Old Spencer Academy in the Choctaw Nation. The account, as it has been handed down, is that Reid heard Willis and his wife Minerva singing at their work, wrote the words and melody down, and later passed them to the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

Willis had been enslaved and was brought west along the removal routes that displaced the Choctaw from Mississippi. The imagery in the song is biblical and specific: the chariot is Elijah's, the river is the Jordan, and the band of angels is coming to carry the singer home. Read as theology it is a song about death and release. Read as something else, which many people do, it is a song about escape.

That second reading needs a caveat, and it is the most commonly repeated inaccuracy attached to the song. It is often asserted that "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" carried coded operational instructions for the Underground Railroad — that the chariot means a particular conveyance and the river a particular crossing. Historians of the period are, on the whole, sceptical. The coded-message theory attached itself to a number of spirituals in the twentieth century and the documentary evidence for it is thin. What is not disputed is that spirituals expressed a longing for deliverance that their singers understood in both spiritual and material terms, and that the ambiguity was the point.

There is a further caution that applies to almost every spiritual, and it is one musicologists make more insistently than popular accounts do. Songs of this kind were made collectively, over time, in performance, and the idea of a single author is largely a nineteenth-century transcriber's convenience. Willis is credited with "Steal Away" as well, on the same evidence and with the same reservations. He may have composed it outright, or shaped an existing melody, or sung a version that Reid then fixed on paper as though it had always been fixed. The word "credited" is doing real work in every sentence about him, and it should be.

None of this reached England for another generation.

What the words actually say

The lyric is short enough to hold in one hand and denser than its reputation suggests, and almost nobody at Twickenham has looked at it.

The chariot is Elijah's. In the Second Book of Kings, Elijah is taken up to heaven by a chariot of fire and a whirlwind, without dying — one of only two figures in the Hebrew Bible said to have been spared death. To sing about a chariot swinging low is to ask for that specific deliverance, taken up rather than buried.

The Jordan is the river the Israelites cross into the promised land, and in the spiritual tradition it does double duty as the boundary of death and as any river standing between the singer and freedom. For enslaved people in the American South, the geography was not abstract. There were rivers, and crossing one in the right direction changed a life.

"A band of angels coming after me" is the rescue party. The verse structure alternates between the singer looking over Jordan and the singer telling a friend that he is bound for home, which is the standard call-and-response architecture of the form: a fixed refrain that everybody knows, and verses that a lead voice can extend as long as the occasion requires.

That last feature is exactly why the song works on a terrace. A refrain that repeats, a melody that sits inside an untrained range, and a structure that survives being sung badly by tens of thousands of people at once. The spiritual was built for collective singing by people with no sheet music, which is a description that fits a rugby crowd rather well.

How the Fisk Jubilee Singers carried it out of the American South

Fisk University was founded in Nashville in 1866 to educate freed slaves, and it was close to insolvent within five years. The response was to send a student choir out to raise money. The Fisk Jubilee Singers were assembled in 1871, and what began as a fundraising expedition became the vehicle by which the spiritual entered the international concert repertoire.

They came to Britain in the 1870s and performed for Queen Victoria. That detail matters more than it looks. It gave the repertoire an English audience, an English publisher and an English respectability at a moment when the music had no other route into the country, and the printed collections of Fisk arrangements circulated in Britain from that point onward.

The name they toured under is itself a piece of theology. The jubilee is the biblical year of release, when debts are cancelled and the enslaved are freed, and a choir of freed people and the children of freed people singing under that banner was making an argument as much as giving a concert. The tour succeeded well enough to fund building work at Fisk, and the university's oldest surviving building carries the Jubilee name for that reason.

The British reception is the part of the story that connects most directly to the ground in south-west London. Victorian Britain had an enormous amateur choral culture — chapel choirs, works choirs, competitive festivals — and the Fisk arrangements landed in the middle of it. Spirituals entered British singing societies, then hymn books, then school assemblies. By the time any rugby crowd sang "Swing Low", several generations of English children had already learned it somewhere, which is the unglamorous mechanism by which a song from Oklahoma became something a stand full of strangers could all perform without rehearsal.

1. 1Indian TerritoryComposed in the nineteenth century, credited to Wallace Willis, a Choctaw freedman.
2. 2TranscriptionWritten down by Alexander Reid and passed to Fisk University in Nashville.
3. 3Fisk Jubilee SingersA student choir formed in 1871 tours to save the university from closure.
4. 4BritainThe choir performs in Britain in the 1870s, including before Queen Victoria, and the arrangements are published here.
5. 5ClubhousesThe song enters British rugby club singing, with its own set of bawdy hand actions.
6. 6TwickenhamAdopted by the terraces. A 1988 match is usually credited, though the RFU's own research found earlier evidence.
7. 7ReviewIn 2020 the RFU examines the song's use and decides on education rather than prohibition.

The commonly accepted route. The step where it enters English rugby is contested and dated differently by different accounts.

By the middle of the twentieth century the song had been recorded by artists across gospel, jazz and folk, and it was part of the general Anglophone songbook. It was available to be picked up by anyone. Rugby picked it up.

The 1988 match everyone credits, and the evidence that complicates it

19 March 1988. England play Ireland at Twickenham in the Five Nations, and Chris Oti, a wing in his first international season, scores three tries in the second half. Oti was one of the very few Black players to have represented England — James Peters, who played for England in the first decade of the twentieth century, was the first, and the gap between them is its own uncomfortable history. A group in the crowd, usually identified as boys from Douai School, sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" as Oti scored, and the ground joined in.

That is the story. It is repeated everywhere, it is broadly consistent across the people who were there, and it is almost certainly not the whole truth.

When the RFU examined the song's history in 2020 it commissioned research into how the song had actually arrived, and the finding reported was that there was evidence of the song being sung at Twickenham before 1988. The 1988 match may have been the moment it became universal rather than the moment it began. That is a distinction worth holding, because the neat version of the story — a Black player, a spiritual, a crowd — has a shape that makes people comfortable, and the messier version does not.

Some context on the afternoon itself. The Five Nations of the 1980s was a championship England spent largely losing, and Twickenham crowds of that era were not the singing crowds they later became — the ground had a reputation for restraint that visiting supporters found funny. A schoolboy group starting a song and having it picked up by an entire stand was a change in the culture of the place, and it happened at a moment when English rugby was starting to be watched by many more people on television. Broadcast is the accelerant in every terrace-song story, and it was here too. Once the song was audible through a commentary microphone at every England home match, learning it required no attendance at all.

The connection between the song and the player is also read two ways. One reading is that the crowd chose a song about deliverance to honour a Black player's finest afternoon. The other is that a crowd sang a song it associated with Black American music because a Black player was scoring, which is a different act entirely. Both readings have been offered by people who were present. The honest position is that a crowd of that size does not have a single intention.

The gestures, and where the rude version came from

The hand actions performed on the terraces are simple. A low sweeping motion of the arm across the body on "swing low", and both arms lifted on "coming for to carry me home". Children pick them up in about a verse.

The actions did not start there. British rugby clubs had a long and thoroughly documented tradition of bawdy singing in the bar after matches, and "Swing Low" was in that repertoire with gestures that were explicitly obscene. The clubhouse version and the terrace version are different performances of the same tune, and the sanitised one is what a family stand does now.

This is one of the more awkward parts of the song's English history, and it tends to get skipped. A piece of religious music written by a man who had been enslaved was, for a period, a rugby drinking song with mimed sexual actions attached. Pointing that out is not an argument for banning anything. It is simply what happened, and it sits badly next to the version in which English rugby adopted the song as a tribute.

What the RFU actually did in 2020, and why

In the summer of 2020, against the background of the Black Lives Matter protests, the RFU said it would review the song's use at England matches. The reporting at the time widely framed this as a possible ban, which was never the union's stated position.

The outcome, published later that year alongside a wider diversity and inclusion plan, was that the song would not be prohibited. The RFU committed instead to educating supporters about the origins of the song and the history it comes out of.

The reasoning holds up, whatever you think of the conclusion. A governing body cannot stop a crowd singing. There is no mechanism — no law, no ticket condition that could survive contact with eighty thousand people, no steward who could act on it. An attempted ban would have produced defiant singing and taught nobody anything about Wallace Willis or Fisk University. The education route is slower and less satisfying and is the only one available.

Position	What it would have required	Why the RFU did not take it
Ban the song	Ticket terms, stewarding, enforcement at scale	No workable mechanism inside a full stadium
Discourage it officially	PA announcements, campaign messaging	Risk of entrenching the song as a protest
Replace it	An alternative anthem the crowd adopts	Crowds choose their own songs and cannot be assigned one
Explain it	Published research, matchday and digital material	The route actually taken

Whether the education has reached the average supporter is a fair question and the answer is probably not yet. Ask around a concourse and you will find a large majority who can sing every word and a small minority who could name the tradition it comes from.

God Save the King, and England's missing anthem

England has no national anthem of its own. It uses the British one, which is a peculiarity a British reader notices immediately at a Six Nations fixture, because the other five nations do not have the same problem.

"God Save the King" is played before England matches at Twickenham, having been "God Save the Queen" until the accession of Charles III in September 2022. Scotland uses "Flower of Scotland", written by Roy Williamson of The Corries and adopted by the Scottish Rugby Union as its pre-match song. Wales uses "Hen Wlad fy Nhadau". Ireland, fielding a team drawn from two jurisdictions, uses "Ireland's Call", written by Phil Coulter and introduced in 1995, and adds "Amhrán na bhFiann" when playing in Dublin.

• 3Anthems in Dublin when Ireland are at home
• 2Anthems at every other Six Nations venue
• 6Nations in the championship

Counts follow from each union's anthem protocol. Ireland plays two at home because the squad is drawn from two jurisdictions.

The argument for England adopting a distinct anthem recurs every few years and never quite resolves. "Jerusalem", Hubert Parry's setting of the Blake lines, is the usual candidate: England uses it at the Commonwealth Games, it is bound up with England's cricket support, and the England rugby league team has used it. Twickenham has stayed with the British anthem. Part of the reason is inertia and part of it is that the RFU has no mandate to choose a national symbol on the country's behalf.

Nation	Sung before Six Nations matches
England	God Save the King
Scotland	Flower of Scotland
Wales	Hen Wlad fy Nhadau
Ireland	Ireland's Call, with Amhrán na bhFiann in Dublin
France	La Marseillaise
Italy	Il Canto degli Italiani

The band, the ceremony and the twenty minutes before kick-off

The pre-match sequence at Twickenham is more formal than most English sporting occasions and is run to a schedule the broadcasters need.

1. 1Band on the pitchA service band plays through the period when the stands are filling.
2. 2Teams warm upBoth squads work at opposite ends. The stadium music stops for the announcements.
3. 3TunnelTeams line up out of sight. The band forms up for the anthems.
4. 4AnthemsVisiting anthem and God Save the King, teams on the halfway line, crowd standing.
5. 5Kick-offThe first sustained singing usually arrives inside the opening quarter, not before it.

The standard shape of the ceremony. Exact timings are set for each fixture by the RFU and the host broadcaster.

The band is a fixture rather than an ornament. Massed military bands have played at Twickenham for decades, and the sound of one on a cold afternoon is a large part of why the ground feels the way it does. Choirs appear for particular fixtures and for the moments the RFU wants to mark.

Supporters occasionally get the anthem protocol wrong in one specific way. The visiting anthem is played first and is expected to be heard in silence and applauded at the end. English rugby crowds do this well, and it is one of the few crowd behaviours in British sport that has improved rather than degraded over the last thirty years. What the crowd does at a match generally, including the silence for goal kicks, is set out in the rugby matchday etiquette guide.

What else gets sung at Twickenham and at club grounds

The English rugby repertoire is small. "Swing Low" carries most of the weight, with short chants around a player's name or a scoreline, and there is nothing at Twickenham resembling the continuous invention of a football end.

Club grounds are more distinctive than the international ground. Gloucester's Shed produces sustained noise rather than organised songs and is the loudest sustained sound in English club rugby. Leicester's Welford Road has its own repertoire built around the club's name. Bath sing on a ground in the middle of a Georgian city with the crowd wrapped around a pitch that has changed shape more than once. The Kingsholm stadium guide covers what makes one of those atmospheres work.

There is a real difference in kind between a Premiership Saturday and an international Saturday, and it is not only one of scale. A club crowd is largely made of people who go every fortnight and know each other, so the singing is a conversation among regulars. An international crowd contains a substantial proportion of people attending their only rugby match of the year, often on a corporate ticket, and a song that everybody already knows is the only thing such a crowd can perform together. That is another structural reason "Swing Low" dominates at Twickenham and does not dominate at Welford Road: it is the lowest common denominator in the best sense, the one item of repertoire that requires nothing of anybody.

Two general observations about English rugby singing. It is keyed to events — a try, a big hit, a kick going over — rather than running underneath the game. And it is far more likely to be joined by the whole stand than a football chant is, because the mixed seating means there is no away end to sing against, a structural point covered in the Twickenham stadium guide.

Abide With Me and the Challenge Cup final's own tradition

Rugby league keeps a musical tradition that union largely lost, and it centres on one hymn.

"Abide With Me" was written by Henry Francis Lyte in 1847, close to the end of his life, and it is a hymn about dusk and mortality. It became attached to the FA Cup final at Wembley from 1927 and to the Rugby League Challenge Cup final, first played at Wembley in 1929, in the interwar years that followed. Both traditions have survived, and at the Challenge Cup final the hymn is sung with a seriousness that surprises people who expect a cup final to be entirely celebratory.

The context is worth stating plainly. The Challenge Cup final's northern audience travelled to Wembley from towns that had lost a great many men in the First World War, and a hymn about the coming of night landed differently on that crowd than a song about a chariot lands on a Six Nations Saturday. The final moved away from Wembley during the stadium's reconstruction and returned when it reopened, and the hymn went with it both ways.

Brass bands remain part of the league matchday in a way they are not in union. Anyone whose only experience of English rugby is Twickenham will find the Wembley Challenge Cup final guide describes a substantially different day out.

How other Six Nations crowds answer it

Every Six Nations ground has its own musical identity, and an England supporter travelling for the first time should expect to be out-sung.

The Principality Stadium in Cardiff is the extreme case. Welsh crowd singing draws on a chapel tradition and a repertoire — "Hen Wlad fy Nhadau", "Calon Lân", "Cwm Rhondda" — that is genuinely choral, in four parts, from people who learned it in school. The Welsh Rugby Union asked its choirs and bands to stop performing "Delilah" at the stadium in 2023, on the grounds that a song narrating the killing of a woman was not something the union wanted associated with its matchdays. The decision drew both criticism and support, and it is a useful comparison with the RFU's handling of "Swing Low": one union removed a song it controlled the performance of, the other declined to remove one it did not.

Murrayfield answers with "Flower of Scotland", a song whose relationship with England is explicit in its lyrics and which the crowd sings unaccompanied through part of the final verse. Dublin has "Ireland's Call" and, from the terraces, "The Fields of Athenry". Paris has "La Marseillaise", which requires no help from anybody. Rome sings less and is improving.

English supporters singing "Swing Low" in those grounds get a mixed reception, more often mocked than resented. The most common response is a Welsh or Irish crowd simply singing over it, which they can, because they have more songs.

The travelling dynamic changes at a World Cup, where England supporters are a minority in a stadium containing several nationalities and the song functions as identification rather than as a challenge. It has been sung in Sydney, in Paris, in Yokohama. The 2003 final in Australia is the fixture most English supporters would name if asked when they sang it hardest, and the events of that night are covered in the 2003 Rugby World Cup guide.

One more comparison worth making. Rugby league's England side, and the northern club crowds it draws from, do not sing "Swing Low" in anything like the same way. The song belongs to union, to Twickenham, and to a particular social history of the fifteen-a-side game in the south of England. That two codes of the same sport in the same country have entirely separate musical inheritances is one of the clearest surviving traces of the 1895 split.

Whether the song is likely to remain part of English rugby

A judgement, since the evidence supports one. The song is not going anywhere in the medium term, and the reasons are structural rather than sentimental.

Crowd songs die when the crowd stops choosing them, and no mechanism exists to make that happen from outside. The RFU understood this in 2020, which is why the review landed where it did. A song sung by eighty thousand people who mostly learned it from their parents at the same ground has an inertia that no institutional position can overcome, and any attempt to overcome it would generate exactly the backlash that would extend the song's life by a decade.

What is likely to change is the level of knowledge attached to it. The 2020 review put material into circulation that had not been there before, and the number of English supporters who could tell you about Fisk University is higher now than it was. That is a slow process and an unglamorous one, and it is the only lever the union actually holds.

The awkwardness does not resolve. A song written out of American slavery is now the property of a crowd in Twickenham, and both of those things are true at once, permanently. English rugby's honest position is to sing it and to know what it is — and the history it came from remains available to anyone at the ground who wants it, which is more than could be said before the review. For where the song sits in the wider season, the England sport hub and the site's rugby coverage set out the fixtures it gets sung at, and the Six Nations format explained covers the championship those Saturdays belong to.