The phrase “steal away” was commonly found in pop and rock songs in the 1970s. Since that decade, the term seldom appeared in any popular music. I don’t even hear much popular music from the 1960s and earlier containing that term, either.
I was a child of the 1970s, and during that time I don’t ever remember anyone using the phrase “steal away” in their day-to-day conversation, even as slang. Thus, a few dumb questions about “steal away”:
Was “steal away” really common 1970s slang? (e.g. “I’m going to steal away to the beach for this weekend.”, “That class is so boring, so I steal away whenever I get the chance.”)
If not, why was the phrase commonly found in pop and rock music from that decade, but not before or afterward?
Does anyone still use the term “steal away” in casual conversation now?
From “Night Moves” by Bob Seger:
…and we’d **steal away **every chance we could
To the back rooms, to the alleys, or the trusty woods.
I used her she used me but neither one cares,
we were getting ur share…
of Workin on our Night Moves…
I was older than you in the 70s (and still am), and I don’t recall hearing that phrase at all, but my WAG is that it’s much, much older. It seems sort of Victorian.
It is not slang, it is perfectly ordinary correct English usage. The OED lists uses of “steal” in this sense (explicitly mentioning that it is commonly used with “away”) going back to 1154 (sense 9 of “steal”), and I have no doubt that it still gets used in this sense all the time. I would certainly find it a perfectly natural thing to say.
It does not follow that just because you happened to notice this phrase in a few '70s pop lyrics that there is anything particularly '70s about it. Lyricists, no doubt, do sometimes tend to pick up phrases from other people’s songs that they hear, so it is possible, I suppose, that it might have got into a number of songs around the same time via this sort of unconscious semi-plagiarism. Frankly, however, I would want a lot more evidence than your casual memory to convince me that the phrase was more common in '70s lyrics than those of any other era.
The only other one I can think of right off is Led Zeppelin’s “How Many More Times”
Oh Rosie, oh girl, oh Rosie, oh girl, steal away, now, steal away…
Maybe it’s an example of not-really-unconscious more-than-semi-plagiarism on little Robert Anthony’s part, referred to by njtt
Elmwood, please do cite more examples. It really doesn’t seem like all that common a phrase in 70s pop lyrics.
I shouldn’t have said “common”, but rather “much more common than in other decades”. I really can’t respond to the calls of “cite?” by providing an analysis of lyrics for Billboard Top 250 lists for every year in the 1970s and compare it to other decades. I’ll just say that whenever I hear a song that includes the lyrics “steal away”, it’s usually from the 1970s.
I never heard it, and I grew up in the 70s, I mean other than the song here and there. Of course I lived in Chicago, which is always the last to get anything.
Then again, I rarely heard words like groovy or other such “common” 70s expression. I certainly never said “groovy.”
Interesting you should post that, it may be the source for something said in my family off and on since I was a kid.
It wasn’t uncommon for someone in the family to say some person or business had “folded their tent and stole away” or variations on that. I’ve said it myself many times over the years.
I’ve never been a fan of poetry, so I was unaware of quoted verse. But my mother was big into all kinds of poetry and verse, and she may have introduced it into our family lexicon.
I was born in the mid '50s, my mother in 1920, and her parents in the 1880s, so it may also have been more common in conversation earlier in the century or the previous century.
And god help me, I still commonly use “cool”, and even “groovy” now and then.
John Kennedy Toole uses a very similar expression (“like Arabs in preparation for stealing away”) in his novel, A Confederacy Of Dunces, which was written in the early 1960’s…
Interesting. Again, my mother being who she was, it’s very possible she was aware of this work. But the “folded their tent” was always part of what we said, so it seems likely it came from the Longfellow passage.
That is the only sort of evidence that would count.
Confirmation bias. You are imagining this. “Steal away” is not a slang and it is not even an unusual idiom. You can find it all over the place (as I said, at least since 1154!). It has no special connection with the 1970s. People still say and write it.
Google gets “about 1,340,000” hits for the phrase “steal away”. The Robbie DuPree song first appears at number 7. Before that are several mentions (including a Wikipedia entry) for a “Negro spiritual” of that title dated to “prior to 1862.” The first Google page also lists two books with the phrase in the title, published in 1993 and 2007 respectively.
Inasmuch as the phrase has any particular connection to any historical era, it seems to be the period before the American Civil War, when slaves were “stealing away” from their masters and escaping via the “underground railroad.” Both those books are about that (presumably so is the spiritual really, although it is ostensibly about your soul going to Jesus). Even so, people were using the phrase long before that era, and have continued to use it (and related phrases) ever since, not just in lyrics and titles but in ordinary conversation, without intending any allusion to escaping slaves.
Google hits for “stealing away”: 123,000
Google hits for “stole away”: 268,000
Google hits for “stolen away”: 227,000 (first one is Dave Mathews Band song)
I don’t recall ever hearing it in the 70s, in common speech. IIRC, it was only used in poems and songs, etc…more of an artistic mode than the vernacular.
I recall an Arlo Guthrie song called “Stealin” which, IIRC, used the word in the same sense, so this would have rang bells for me back then and I would have noted it. I never did, or at most, once.
I’m sure it did, at least originally. It’s not unique to your family, incidentally – it’s quite a well-spread expression: here’s a sighting of it in the wild.
