Steal Away

Lyrics

The lyrics below are preserved exactly as documented in nineteenth-century primary sources. Dialect, spelling, and phrasing reflect the living tradition of the communities who created and sang these songs. Standardizing the language would erase the historical record. See our editorial standards for more.

Historical Context

"Steal Away" is attributed by tradition to Nat Turner, the Virginia-born enslaved preacher who led the bloodiest slave revolt in American history in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. According to accounts passed down in the Turner community, he composed "Steal Away" as a signal song — a means of calling his followers to secret meetings in the woods without alerting white overseers. The meetings were where Turner organized the rebellion.

This attribution cannot be definitively verified, but it is historically plausible and reflects the broader documented reality that spirituals served as covert communication within enslaved communities. What is certain is that "Steal Away" was widely understood, within and without enslaved communities, to have double meanings: "stealing away to Jesus" simultaneously meant slipping away from the plantation under cover of darkness.

The song entered the formal spiritual canon through the Fisk Jubilee Singers and is documented in J.B.T. Marsh's The Story of the Jubilee Singers; With Their Songs (1880). It also appears in the Hampton Collection. By the time the Jubilee Singers sang it in Northern concert halls, it was already understood as a song that carried the history of resistance within it.

Cultural Significance

The word "steal" is not accidental. To steal oneself — to take possession of one's own body — was an act of radical self-definition in a system that classified human beings as property. The verb does not disguise the covert act; it names it plainly, then consecrates it: steal away to Jesus. Escape and devotion are folded into the same imperative.

"I ain't got long to stay here" is the song's most urgent line — and its most ambiguous. It can mean the soul's longing to depart earthly life for heaven, or a slave's calculation that the moment to run has arrived. Both readings are simultaneously available, and this simultaneity is the song's essential quality. Sung in secret worship, surrounded by people who shared the code, both meanings would have been present at once.

Albert Raboteau's Slave Religion documents the "invisible institution" of enslaved religious practice — the secret meetings, the ring shouts, the worship conducted outside white supervision — as the context in which songs like "Steal Away" functioned. These were not merely musical events. They were community gatherings that sustained cultural memory, organized resistance, and maintained human dignity under a system designed to destroy it.

The trumpet sound "within-a my soul" is an apocalyptic image drawn from the Book of Revelation — the last trump heralding the end of the present order. For enslaved singers, the end of the present order was not an abstraction.

Scholarly Notes

The Nat Turner attribution is taken seriously by historians, including Vincent Harding (There Is a River, 1981), whose comprehensive history of Black freedom struggles examines "Steal Away" in the context of Turner's rebellion and the broader antebellum resistance tradition. Harding is careful to distinguish between tradition and documentation but does not dismiss the attribution.

The "coded spirituals" thesis — that many antebellum spirituals contained systematic coded messages for Underground Railroad activity — is a contested area of scholarship. Folklorist Dena Epstein argues for skepticism about claims that specific songs had specific operational meanings, noting the lack of contemporaneous documentation. Other scholars, including John Lovell Jr. and Giles Oakley, argue that the dual meanings were pervasive and effective precisely because they were deniable.

The productive tension between these positions is itself historically meaningful: the spirituals' power lay partly in their plausible deniability. A song about heavenly escape that could also be about earthly escape served both purposes regardless of whether any individual singer consciously intended both at any given moment.

James Weldon Johnson wrote of "Steal Away" in The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925) as a song that achieved its emotional power through understatement — the quiet urgency of "steal" rather than "run," the interior trumpet rather than an external alarm, the soul rather than the body as the subject. This restraint, Johnson argued, was a form of artistic mastery.