This series of essays focuses on the significance of Negro spirituals, a genre of music with a rich legacy in American history and a deep impact on popular culture. Make sure to check out the introduction to the series, an interview with expert choral conductor and arranger Dr. Rollo Dilworth.
“Ezekiel Saw the Wheel” is the only Negro spiritual that I know that involves a geometric pattern.
My first exposure to this piece was probably with Dr. Dilworth when we sang the William Dawson arrangement of the tune during my time in the North Park University Choir. I remember because we used the “Dalcroze eurhythmics” technique of moving along with the music—but our movement was brighter and faster than usual. Where other spirituals had a tempo that trudged forward in a stately, dignified manner—indicative of the preservation of dignity amidst oppression—this arrangement was the total opposite. It doesn’t trudge; it zooms. It moves like a freight train headed to glory.
Which makes sense if you know anything about William Dawson. He was an acclaimed composer, choir director, professor, and musicologist who studied under the tutelage of famed African American scholar Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute of Alabama (now known as Tuskegee University).
As the son of a father born into slavery who didn’t have the opportunity to be educated, Dawson literally had to run away from home—and the shoemaking apprenticeship that his father demanded of him—to board a train and attend Tuskegee. According to Mark Hugh Malone, author of William Levi Dawson: American Music Educator, Dawson took a second job as an errand boy for a dry goods retailer in his hometown of Anniston, where he rode a used bicycle to make deliveries. Dawson used the money he earned from that job to buy a trunk to store his belongings, sold the bike to pay for a train ticket to Tuskegee, asked a friend to carry the trunk, waited until his father left home to go to church, then walked to a distant rail depot miles away to avoid being caught by his father in Anniston.
“Dawson was in awe of the buildings that composed the school he sought so long to attend,” wrote Malone in his biography. “With only $1.50 in his pocket, he stepped off the train to begin a new challenge.”
William Dawson infused “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel” with the same hopeful, furious excitement that he likely felt the day he rode that train to the beginning of a new life.
The big wheel run by faith
and the little wheel run by the grace of God
A wheel in a wheel
Way in the middle of the air.
When I chatted with Dr. Dilworth, he shared his own take on “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel,” which is written as the inscription to his own published arrangement.
“This spiritual describes the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of an elaborate chariot comprised of four living creatures, each having four faces. African American slaves were particularly curious about the role of the chariot in biblical narratives because it connected their faith with a vehicle they believed would carry them to an eternal home of freedom and peace. In very close proximity to this special chariot are angels, arranged in a circular pattern, resembling ‘a wheel in the middle of a wheel.’ Symbolizing safety and protection, these wheel-shaped angels became a central theme of the spiritual’s refrain.”
It’s worth reading through the whole first chapter of Ezekiel because the prophet’s vision is much more elaborate than what the song would imply. In verse 17, the wheel is described in the NIV thusly: “As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not change direction as the creatures went.”
My point is, that’s a lot more than just “a wheel within a wheel.” I wonder if Ezekiel’s experience was anything like when I try to explain a dream to my spouse the next morning. It only sort-of makes sense… there are details and concepts that meld together and don’t quite cohere, but in the end you get a general idea of what happened and why it mattered.
It’s also important to note that Ezekiel was a prophet. This particular vision may be one of his most well-known (second only to the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37), but all of Ezekiel’s visions took place as part of his prophetic role of sharing God’s mind with God’s people. And during most of Ezekiel’s tenure, the people of Israel were wayward. God needed a prophet to send them a bold message of judgment and repentance, and he sent Ezekiel.
This is why the verses of “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel” are words of warning:
Better mind my brother, how you walk on the cross.
Your foot might slip and your soul get lost.
Ol’ Satan wears a club foot shoe.
If you don’t mind, he’ll slip it on you.
Centuries later, these enslaved people who longed for the freedom and citizenship in heaven they’d been so cruelly deprived of on earth encapsulated Ezekiel’s powerful vision in a song they could carry with them. The judgment of the evil they endured would not be carried out during their time, but the song was a reminder that it was coming. The chariot was a metaphor for deliverance and ascendance, both in the current life and the one thereafter.
Indeed, transportation metaphors like the chariot have endured in the contributions of African American musicians to the broader American culture. You can trace a line from songs like “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” to hits like Gladys Knight and the Pips, “Midnight Train to Georgia”; “Love Train,” by The O’Jays; “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car,” by Billy Ocean; and rap hits like Sir-Mix-A-Lot’s “My Hooptie,” LL Cool J’s “The Boomin’ System,” and “Let Me Ride,” by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.
But what does this have to do with us, here and now?
Well, on a basic level, “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel” is a good reminder to keep the tires properly inflated on my Volvo. I mean, what else are tire inner tubes, if not a wheel within a wheel? (By the way, Ezekiel 1:18 in the NIV starts with “their rims were high and awesome” in case you need a biblical prooftext supporting the practice of putting spinning rims on a hydraulically lifted Chevy Impala.)
But on a deeper level, it’s a reminder that God’s sovereignty supersedes any of the limitations I might face in my daily life.
“The big wheel runs by faith,” the lyrics remind us, “and the little wheel runs by the grace of God.” Those two concepts, faith and grace, are two wheels held together on a divine axle. Especially as an enslaved person, you would need faith to believe that deliverance is even a possibility. As we’re reminded in Hebrews 11, faith is the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (v. 1, KJV).
But you also need grace. In church, sometimes grace is defined as undeserved favor. But there’s another layer. Grace can also be described as a kind of divine providence that helps us perform important tasks during critical moments amidst fierce opposition. It’s often described as “grace under fire.”
This is the grace the slaves sang about in “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel.” It’s grace that enables, that protects, that inspires us to keep going. As Israel Houghton sang in “If Not for Your Grace,” it’s “grace that restores, grace that redeems, grace that repairs visions and dreams.”
So whatever your struggle today, whatever situation or challenge looms large over your life, know that God is capable of intervening on your behalf. Be reminded that unjust systems, even when they appear to have the upper hand, are temporary. As surely as wheels can turn this way or that, God can turn the tables on the wicked in the blink of an eye.
And 1 Thessalonians 4:17 reminds us that when the day of judgment arrives, God’s people on the ground will be reunited with the ones already ascended. One glad morning, when this life is over, Jesus will take the wheel once and for all.
And we’ll get to join him, and them…
Way in the middle of the air.
