Michael, Row the Boat Ashore

The story

"Michael, Row the Boat Ashore" is a traditional spiritual first noted during the American Civil War on St. Helena Island, one of the Sea Islands of South Carolina. It was sung by formerly enslaved people whose owners had abandoned the island before the Union navy arrived to enforce its blockade. Charles Pickard Ware, an abolitionist and Harvard graduate who came to supervise the island's plantations from 1862 to 1865, wrote it down in music notation as he heard the freedmen sing it, and his cousin William Francis Allen reported in 1863 that they sang it as they rowed him across Station Creek. Allen, Ware and Lucy McKim Garrison first published it in 1867 in Slave Songs of the United States, in two versions: one in unrhymed couplets, one in rhyme.

Its words tell of crossing the River Jordan, where Jesus was baptised, an image that can stand for deliverance and salvation, for the border of the Promised Land, and for death and the passage to Heaven. According to Allen, the Michael of the song is the Archangel Michael, whom Catholic tradition often sees as the guide of the souls of the dead. The song stayed alive in the Sea Islands' oral tradition: Guy and Candie Carawan recorded it on Johns Island in the 1960s, and Janie Hunter of the Moving Star Hall singers recalled that her father, the son of formerly enslaved people, sang it as he rowed his boat back to shore after fishing. Smithsonian Folkways released the Carawans' recording of Hunter and three Moving Star Hall singers in 1967.

The version most people know was adapted in 1954 by the Boston folk singer and teacher Tony Saletan, who found the song in a library copy of Slave Songs of the United States. He kept its one-word chorus, added harmony and, to give teenagers rhymes, replaced the original verses, often a single line sung twice, with traditional African-American couplets. He taught it to Pete Seeger the same year, the Weavers sang it at their Christmas Eve reunion concert of 1955, and Saletan shared a 1958 copyright in the adaptation with the members of the Weavers. The Highwaymen's version, titled simply "Michael", reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks in September 1961 and No. 1 in the United Kingdom; it changed the line about meeting the singer's mother on the other side to "milk and honey", the Promised Land of Exodus. Lonnie Donegan, Harry Belafonte, Trini Lopez and, in French, Rika Zaraï recorded it soon after, and Seeger taught it to Big Bird on Sesame Street in 1970.

In September 1961, the month the Highwaymen's record reached No. 1, Herbert Lee, a charter member of the local NAACP, was murdered in Amite County, Mississippi. According to a note smuggled out of the county jail by Bob Moses, civil rights activists arrested for protesting the killing sang a version of "Michael" to keep their spirits up, led by Hollis Watkins.

What it says

A rowing song and a spiritual. The singers call on Michael to row the boat ashore, answering each line with "Hallelujah", and the crossing of the river becomes the crossing of the Jordan into the Promised Land and the passage from death to Heaven. The mood is steady and hopeful, kept in time with the oars.

The words