Roll the Chariot Along
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-07-15

Day 121 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

Sandburg writes: "What would the big brutal city be without that international interdenominational organization, The Salvation Army? It is ready to take any popular song, any ragtime ditty or jazz tune, and tie it up to religion. I have heard converts sing:

"There are flies on you,
There are flies on me,
But there ain't no flies on Jesus."

"Reading Bramwell Booth's memoirs (the son and successor of General William Booth, the founder of The Salvation Army), we notice that forty years ago, and more (the 1880's and earlier), the Army street  meetings were broken up; singers of gospel hymns were pelted with bad eggs and worse tomatoes.  Time has passed. The Army is respectable now, is established, with million dollar real estate  holdings. When the big bass drum is laid flat and the public invited to throw dimes or dollars onto  the drum, there is no outside interference. They challenge the Devil and worship God in peace.  An old Saturday night favorite in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and Waterloo, Iowa, is "The Chariot  Song," trumpeted with jubilee "voices as the bass drum invites contributions. I heard it on the  public square, in front of sample rooms and saloons on Prairie Street, in Galesburg, on nights when  "the Q pay car" (the Railway Pay wagon) had come in."