Wade in the Water

By 1966, the Ramsey Lewis Trio had already made a career of pulling jazz instrumentals into pop-chart territory, and “Wade in the Water” — recorded at Chicago’s Universal Recording Studio for the Cadet Records album of the same name, produced by Esmond Edwards — pushed that formula further than most of the trio’s catalog. The rhythm section behind Lewis’s piano was Cleveland Eaton on bass and Maurice White on drums, four years before White left to found Earth, Wind & Fire, and the version here is dressed up with trombone and Richard Evans’ big-band arrangement rather than played as a stripped-down piano trio. That’s a real departure from the raw, congregational feel of the source spiritual, and the record is honest about the trade: what’s gained is a genuinely great, hooky arrangement that climbed to No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 3 on the R&B chart; what’s lost is some of the rougher, call-and-response urgency that makes the original song what it is.

The spiritual itself predates any of this by roughly a century — its lyrics were first published in 1901 in the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ hymnal, though it circulated in oral tradition among enslaved African Americans well before that, and it draws its imagery directly from Exodus and a healing narrative in the Gospel of John. W.E.B. Du Bois devoted a chapter of The Souls of Black Folk to spirituals like this one, calling them the “Sorrow Songs.”

One popular story about the song deserves direct correction rather than repetition: the widely circulated claim that Harriet Tubman used “Wade in the Water” as a coded instruction, telling escaping slaves to leave dry land so bloodhounds would lose their scent. It’s a compelling story, and it shows up constantly in liner notes and retrospectives — but it isn’t documented history. Wikipedia’s own entry on the song states plainly that the connection “has not been proven, it is believed,” and the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad program treats this style of claim — coded songs and quilts functioning as literal escape instructions — as folklore that doesn’t hold up against the primary sources, including Tubman’s own dictated recollections. The song’s real historical significance doesn’t need the embellishment; a spiritual this old, this widely recorded, and still capable of becoming a Top 20 pop single 65 years after it was first transcribed is remarkable enough on its own terms.

8.0/10 — a crossover arrangement smart enough to earn its chart run, built on material whose actual history is more interesting than the myth attached to it.

Hero image: Jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis, photographed August 2014, by Jeff Dunn, licensed under CC BY 2.0.