John McCrady: Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
The Thin Veil
At a deathbed, the visible world meets a vision of a descending chariot, a host of angels, and a struggle for a soul. What does McCrady allow us to see?
There are things we can see and things we cannot. We can sit beside someone who is dying, witness the slowing of a life, and be present at the moment of death. What happens beyond that moment, if anything, lies outside our experience. We can imagine it. We can believe in it. We can give it stories, songs, and images. But between what we can witness and what we can only imagine or believe there remains a boundary — a thin veil.
John McCrady’s Swing Low, Sweet Chariot brings us very close to that boundary.
A Southern World
Much of what McCrady gives us is reassuringly concrete. A modest house stands beside a country road. Dead plants remain in boxes along the porch railing. An empty swing hangs from a tree. An automobile has stopped outside. Dogs gather nearby. Through an open doorway we can make out several people inside.
It is a Southern world McCrady knew well. Born in Mississippi in 1911, he studied at the Art Students League in New York, where Thomas Hart Benton and Kenneth Hayes Miller were among his teachers. Afterward he returned South and made its places and people central to his work. [1]
Contemporary writers readily understood that work within the broad current of American Regionalism. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot also quickly became one of the paintings through which the young McCrady became nationally known. When it was shown at New York’s Boyer Galleries in October 1937, Art Digest predicted that the “greatest popularity” of the exhibition would probably center on this painting. [2] The popular magazine Life titled a five-page feature “‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ and Other Paintings by John McCrady” and reproduced the painting in color; other national publications also took notice. [3] The following year McCrady selected it for an exhibition of contemporary American art in St. Louis, where the museum purchased it. [4]
Yet calling Swing Low Regionalist tells us only so much. McCrady’s Southern world contains not only houses, roads, fields, people, and automobiles. It contains things that cannot ordinarily be seen.
It is night.
A radiant quarter moon hangs in the sky, while much of the landscape lies in darkness. But a broad illumination pours through the clouds along the path of a descending chariot. The house has its own light. Through its open doorway, a brightly illuminated interior reveals another scene.
Several people have gathered around the bed of an elderly man. Their attention is directed toward him. The doorway frames a scene within the larger scene: an intimate human vigil enclosed within a much more expansive event.
We remain outside, looking in.
At the Threshold
The doorway is an actual threshold. McCrady also makes it the place from which we encounter another.
The people inside can sit beside the dying man. They can see him and perhaps touch and speak to him. Nothing in their behavior suggests that they are aware of what is happening immediately above the house.
We are.
A heavenly host fills the illuminated sky. A golden chariot drawn by white horses descends through the clouds, followed by a long procession of haloed figures. Closer to the roof, angels tumble and descend; several sound long trumpets. Their abundance matters. McCrady has not sent a solitary messenger to collect the dying man. Heaven seems to have arrived in force.
The title tells us where this imagery comes from. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” asks the chariot to come down and carry the singer home. Another familiar line looks across Jordan and asks what the singer sees: a band of angels coming after him. [5]
McCrady takes what the spiritual makes present in words and song and gives it visible form.
The relationship was personal as well as pictorial. Thirty years later McCrady remembered the music he had heard from Black people during his youth as being as natural to his environment as other elements of nature. He understood those songs as expressions of religious philosophy joined with legend, myth, and poetry. [6]
Here the spiritual has acquired a particular place and a particular dying man. The chariot has swung low. The heavenly host has come for him.
But Satan has come as well.
A Battle for a Soul
Seen within the larger procession, the devil is part of the same supernatural event as the chariot, angels, and trumpets. Seen more closely, however, McCrady makes him unmistakable. He is bright red, horned and tailed. A serpent coils around him. He breathes fire and carries a pitchfork. These are familiar conventions of Christian imagery rather than literal biblical descriptions, just as McCrady’s winged human angels belong to a long Christian visual tradition.
One of the Black angels has seized the devil by both a horn and his tail. The devil struggles, but the angel appears to have him firmly in hand.
The encounter has an almost comic physicality. It is difficult not to hear the old expression about having the devil by the tail, although there is no reason to assume McCrady intended the verbal association. What matters more is what he actually painted: Satan is present, but he is being restrained.
Contemporary viewers understood the conflict. The 1937 Art Digest described the painting as the story of a dying Black man’s soul and its journey toward heaven, with temptations encountered along the way.[2] Thirty years later, responding to a student’s interpretation of the painting, McCrady was more direct:
“As you say, Satan battles for a soul.” [6]
The conflict is therefore not something we need to impose upon the image. But neither does McCrady present the two sides equally. A single red Satan struggles beneath a heavenly host, while a Black angel holds him by horn and tail and the chariot continues its descent.
There is another detail worth pausing over. McCrady’s heavenly host includes both Black and white angels. More than that, he gives a Black angel the active role of restraining Satan. In a painting made by a white Mississippi artist in 1937, centered upon the death of a Black man and drawing its central imagery from an African American spiritual, that is a notable choice. We need not decide precisely what McCrady meant by it before recognizing that he chose to paint heaven this way.
Piercing the Veil
The family inside the house appears unaware of all this. Their attention remains on the man in the bed. They witness his dying, but nothing in their gestures suggests awareness of the drama unfolding above them.
Back on the ground, the dogs occupy a more ambiguous position.
Outside the house, beneath the empty tree swing, they are conspicuously alert. Robert L. Gambone later described them as barking at the supernatural spectacle. [7] The painting certainly invites the possibility that they sense something the people inside do not.
And then there is us as third-party witnesses.
McCrady places us in a privileged position. We see through the doorway into the brightly illuminated room. We see the dying man and the people gathered around him. We see the dogs outside, the quarter moon and the darkened countryside. But we also see the heavenly host, the descending chariot, and Satan being held back.
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The family witnesses the death. The dogs perhaps sense something beyond it. We are allowed to witness the whole.
As third-party viewers, we have become witnesses to a sacred event of passing.
But whose vision are we witnessing?
In 1967 a university student named Martha McDonnell wrote about Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and sent her paper to McCrady. His lengthy reply is unusually revealing because he was not simply explaining the subject of a painting made thirty years earlier. He was responding to someone who had looked closely and asked what kind of picture it was. [6]
McCrady wrote that a painter’s language concerns reflections of things that “go beyond facts” — things that are “intangible but are still definite.” [6]
Later in the letter he considered the old problem of painting angels. Courbet had famously said that he could not paint an angel because he had never seen one. McCrady answered with Ruskin’s contrary proposition: let the person who has seen angels paint them. Then McCrady added:
“I like other artist, paint what I see. However, we are not all looking in the same direction.” [6]
That is a remarkable statement to make about Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.
McCrady does not ask us to distinguish a real house and dying man from an imaginary chariot and angels. For him, apparently, the distinction was not so simple. Some things could be intangible and nevertheless definite. Painting could go “beyond facts.” And what one person could see might depend upon where — or perhaps how — one looked.
What McCrady Saw
The house itself had existed.
McCrady remembered finding it while sketching near Oxford, Mississippi, some thirty years before writing to McDonnell. An old man was sitting on the porch. They talked. The man asked whether McCrady was making his picture and quickly explained that he would not be able to buy it because he could not afford it. [6]
McCrady later returned and sketched the man again. Years afterward, having painted Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and after the St. Louis museum had acquired it, he returned once more.
The man was gone.
So was the house.
Only the fields remained, still faintly marked by the old man’s plowing, and even those signs of his labor were disappearing. [6]
McCrady had encountered the man in the observable world. When he returned, he encountered his absence. The painting occupies the space between those experiences, imagining — or, perhaps more accurately for McCrady, envisioning — what might have happened beyond anything he could have witnessed.
His conclusion to the story is therefore especially striking:
“I feel today that something like what is depicted in the painting, was very likely what really happened.” [6]
“Something like” matters. McCrady does not claim knowledge of the old man’s death or insist upon the literal accuracy of every angel, horse, serpent, horn, and pitchfork he painted.
But neither does he dismiss them as fantasy.
The statement helps us understand why the observable and supernatural parts of Swing Low are painted with such similar conviction. The chariot has substance. Angels have bodies. Satan is almost aggressively corporeal. The supernatural does not dissolve into mist as it approaches the material world.
McCrady paints the unseen with the concreteness of the seen.
Looking Beyond the Veil
The attention Swing Low, Sweet Chariot received in 1937 did not quickly disappear. More than thirty years later McCrady wrote to the museum that wherever he traveled he encountered people who knew the picture and wanted to ask him questions about it.[8] Museum director Charles E. Buckley replied that the painting continued to provoke “a great deal of comment” and had “held up remarkably well.” [9]
Perhaps that durability has something to do with the question McCrady placed before us.
We begin outside a house at night. Through an open doorway we see a brightly illuminated room where people have gathered around someone who is dying. It is something human beings have witnessed for as long as there have been human beings.
Above them, another illumination crosses the darkness. A heavenly host descends. Satan struggles with an angel. A golden chariot comes to carry the dying man home.
The painting does not ask us to prove that one scene is real and the other is not. Nor does McCrady require us to see what he saw.
Instead, he gives pictorial form to something that, for him, seems to have been no less meaningful because it could not ordinarily be seen — to those things he called “intangible but … still definite.”[6]
Perhaps that is what makes the open doorway so important. We stand outside it looking toward a scene we can understand: a family gathered at a deathbed. Yet McCrady has enlarged our field of vision. He asks us to look not only through the doorway, but beyond what ordinary observation can disclose.
Nearly thirty years after painting Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, he could still say that something like what he had pictured was “very likely what really happened.” [6]
We do not have to follow him there. For us, the thin veil remains. But for a moment, McCrady allows us to look with him beyond it.
Notes
[1] Teresa Parker Farris, “John McCrady,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, updated May 16, 2022; The Johnson Collection, “John McCrady.” Both summarize McCrady’s Southern background, study at the Art Students League, and work with Thomas Hart Benton and Kenneth Hayes Miller.
[2] “Loneliness Stirred His Brush to Activity,” Art Digest, vol. 12, October 15, 1937, p. 15. The contemporary article reproduces Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and discusses the painting as the likely center of popular attention in McCrady’s Boyer Galleries exhibition.
[3] “‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ and Other Paintings by John McCrady,” Life, October 18, 1937. See also Robert L. Gambone, Art and Popular Religion in Evangelical America, 1915–1940 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), p. 114, for the contemporary national reception.
[4] Gambone, Art and Popular Religion in Evangelical America, pp. 114–15. The painting entered the collection of the City Art Museum of St. Louis (now Saint Louis Art Museum) in 1938; accession 7:1938, Eliza McMillan Trust.
[5] “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” traditional African American spiritual. The familiar text includes the chariot “coming for to carry me home” and a “band of angels.”
[6] John McCrady to Martha McDonnell, April 14, 1967, five-page typed letter, object file for Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, City Art Museum of St. Louis / Saint Louis Art Museum. Quotations preserve McCrady’s wording in the archival copy.
[7] Robert L. Gambone, Art and Popular Religion in Evangelical America, 1915–1940, pp. 114–16. Gambone describes the moonlit Mississippi setting, Gabriel, the descending angels and chariot, the dogs, and the struggle with Lucifer.
[8] John McCrady to Director, City Art Museum of St. Louis, February 22, 1968, object file for Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. McCrady remarks that the painting still had appeal and that people across the country recognized it and asked him questions.
[9] Charles E. Buckley, Director, City Art Museum of St. Louis, to John McCrady, February 29, 1968, object file for Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Buckley calls it a popular picture that provoked much comment and had “held up remarkably well.”
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