Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Well! The spiritual “Ezekiel Saw De Wheel” is a pretty strange song. Have you ever wondered what on earth it means, or have you just sung it, or listened to it, and enjoyed the rhythm and tune?
If you take a look at the first chapter of the book of Ezekiel in the Jewish Bible/Old Testament you’ll find the source for the images of this spiritual. Ezekiel, we are told, is writing during the Jewish exile in Babylon, which occurred after Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem in about 595 BC. He was a contemporary of both Daniel and Jeremiah, and his book is full of visions and prophecies which are pretty strange and hard to understand, it must be admitted. But Ezekiel himself tells us that he’s simply reporting what God showed him:
The simplified explanation of how black spirituals came about goes like this: slaves heard about Christianity after arriving in the US and, especially on the southern plantations, came up with sung versions of those teachings that gave them hope of a better life, expressed their longings for deliverance, and often served as rhythmic work songs. All of this is perfectly true but raises further questions: how did this “hearing about Christianity” come about? And why, if you think about it, would slaves adopt the religion of those who had enslaved them? Wouldn’t they see that religion as massive hypocrisy on the part of the slave owners? There’s also a tendency, which I have unfortunately shared, to think of spirituals as rather primitive. But that tendency is clearly mistaken: these are songs with deep meaning, displaying a breadth of Scriptural knowledge. To quote a modern African-American scholar and preacher, 
Several interesting (to me, anyway) questions to be answered about what the angels said to the shepherds on Christmas night.
What’s distinctive about Ron Jeffers is that he’s a living composer who has produced a significant amount of original music and arrangements, all for sale as sheet music from various outlets including his own company, Earthsongs, and whose music is performed quite frequently if YouTube is anything to go by, and yet . . . he has no online presence whatsoever. No personal website. No blog, No (worst of all) Wikipedia entry! How is this possible? In fact, if I hadn’t looked under “Ronald Jeffers” instead of either “Ron Jeffers” or “Ronald Harrison Jeffers,” I wouldn’t have gotten much information beyond his date and place of birth and a list of his publications.
