Michael, Row the Boat Ashore

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Michael, Row the Boat Ashore
Traditional, arranged by Tony Saletan, 1954

This gentle song began on the water. During the Civil War, Union forces arrived at St. Helena Island, one of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, and the plantation owners fled ahead of them. The people they had enslaved stayed behind. In 1862 a young Harvard graduate and abolitionist named Charles Pickard Ware came to oversee the island’s plantations. When he heard the freed men and women singing this spiritual, he wrote the melody down in musical notation. His cousin, William Francis Allen, reported in 1863 that the oarsmen sang it as they rowed him across Station Creek.

In 1867, Allen, Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison published the song in Slave Songs of the United States, the first systematic effort to collect and preserve the songs of enslaved people in America. Allen explained that the Michael in the song is the archangel Michael. The river in the verses is the Jordan, long a symbol of deliverance and of crossing over to a better shore. Those 1867 words are in the public domain; however, the version most of us sing today is not.

After that, the song rested quietly in that old book for nearly ninety years. In 1954, a Boston folksinger and teacher named Tony Saletan found it in a library copy and was taken with how singable the tune was. He added a guitar accompaniment. Each original verse was simply one line sung twice, so he swapped in rhyming couplets drawn from other African American spirituals, thinking rhymes would appeal to the teenagers at the Shaker Village Work Camp, where he first taught it. Later that year he taught it to Pete Seeger. Saletan himself never recorded it.

Seeger brought the song to the Weavers, who sang it at their Christmas Eve concert in 1955. It was a reunion for the group, after political blacklisting had kept them off the stage for several years. A recording of that concert came out in 1957, and the song began spreading through the folk revival.

The record that made it a household tune came from the Highwaymen, a folk quintet, who recorded it in 1960 under the simple title “Michael.” Their version opens and closes with one of the singers whistling the melody alone. In September 1961 it spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It also topped the easy-listening chart and went to No. 1 in Britain, and Billboard ranked it the third-biggest song of the year. The Highwaymen changed one well-known line: where the folk version sang of meeting mother on the other side, they sang of milk and honey, the Bible’s picture of the Promised Land. That same year, Lonnie Donegan’s version reached No. 6 in the UK.

The song has turned up in some surprising places since. That same September, civil rights activists jailed in Mississippi sang their own version to keep their spirits up, adding hopeful new verses of their own. In 1968, Diana Ross and the Supremes, playing three nuns arriving by canoe, sang it on an episode of the Tarzan television series. In 1970, Pete Seeger sang it on Sesame Street to show Big Bird how a singalong works. That is just what the song has been doing around campfires ever since.