"Steal Away" is a long-time standard in the old-time spiritual repertoire. It was supposedly composed by Wallace Willis, a slave of a Choctaw freedman in the old Indian Territory, sometime before 1862. Fred Smith (1909-2007) was the grandson of a former slave who settled in Oxford County in the days following the American Civil War. He lived in both Innerkip and Woodstock over the years. Fred was well-known as a Gospel singer, a lay preacher and a herb doctor. Recorded at the Norwich & District Museum by Evan Gordon and Ian Bell in 1997.