Wallis Willis
Musician · 1820–1880
Best known for
Songwriter
Wallis Willis — also recorded as Wallace Willis and remembered locally as “Uncle Wallis” — was a Choctaw Freedman in the Indian Territory of what is now southeastern Oklahoma who is credited with composing several African-American spirituals, including “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” one of the most-recorded songs in American history. The Fisk Jubilee Singers’ tours carried his music to the world in the 1870s.
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- Was likely born in Mississippi, the Choctaw ancestral homeland, in roughly 1820, and took his surname from his owner Britt Willis.
- Moved with the Choctaw and their Black slaves to Indian Territory along the Trail of Tears in the 1830s, settling in what is now Choctaw County, Oklahoma, near present-day Hugo.
- Composed several spirituals before the Civil War, said to have been inspired in part by the Red River, which reminded him of the Jordan in the story of the prophet Elijah.
- Co-composed “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” — sources differ on the exact date, but it appears to have been written by the late 1860s; some accounts share the credit with his daughter Aunt Minerva.
- Before the Civil War, Willis and Minerva worked at the Choctaw boys’ school Spencer Academy, where the superintendent, the Rev. Alexander Reid, heard them sing.
- Reid heard the Fisk University Jubilee Singers perform in 1871, judged their songs less powerful than the Willises’, and arranged for the Jubilee Singers to learn the Willis spirituals.
- Died around 1880, before his songs traveled the world under other singers’ names.