The Old Ship Of Zion: A Song History
"The Old Ship of Zion" is an African American spiritual with an unusually tangled printed history: its many versions share little beyond a mention of the ship of Zion and a short "hallelujah" refrain, and its tune turns up in several different forms.[1] An early eyewitness account dates from November 27, 1850, when a visitor to an African Methodist church in Cincinnati wrote down a question-and-answer version about the ship, its timbers, its crew and its captain, a passage later quoted by Dena Epstein in Sinful Tunes and Spirituals (1977).[1] Related words had already been printed in collections from white publishers, beginning with the 1842 fifth edition of Sacred Melodies, a Free Will Baptist words-only collection, and continuing in The Pilgrim's Choice (1843), The American Vocalist (1849) and, with music, The Social Harp (1854).[1] Drawing on the hymn scholar Ellen Jane Lorenz, the Discipleship Ministries article judges it likely that these white-published variants and the version later printed in Slave Songs were sung side by side at the interracial frontier revivals of the Second Great Awakening.[1] Slave Songs of the United States (1867) gave it as No. 125 in two quite different versions, one sung about twenty-five years earlier in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and the other from North Carolina.[2] A decade later the Fisk Jubilee Singers' version, printed in J. T. Marsh's The Story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers (1877), used yet another tune.[1]
Albert Ernest Markes, Ship at Sea, watercolor, late 19th century. A sailing ship in heavy seas, shown for the spiritual's ship of Zion; the watercolor has no connection to the song.
The version found in current hymnals is a later and simpler one, set to the melody of "Give Me That Old Time Religion"; the earliest copy the Discipleship Ministries writer had found is "Get on Board" in The National Jubilee Melodies (1916), issued by the National Baptist Convention of America, and after the early 1930s the older variants dropped out of print.[1] This version is No. 345 in The United Methodist Hymnal (1989) and is found in more than fifteen hymnals, among them Songs of Zion (1981) and the African American Heritage Hymnal (2001).[1] For enslaved Africans, who had been carried across the Atlantic by ship, a ship of deliverance was a pointed image, and William B. McClain, in his 1990 companion to Songs of Zion, argued that the "ship of Zion" also served as a code name for escape, a reading the Discipleship Ministries article supports with a letter in which Harriet Tubman, warning her family of her return, used the ship's arrival as the signal for her brothers.[1] McClain noted that the escape meaning later faded, leaving the spiritual a frequent choice at funerals.[1]
Thomas A. Dorsey drew on the spiritual for his 1950 gospel song "Old Ship of Zion," while a gospel song of the same title by M. J. Cartwright, set to a tune by Daniel B. Towner, is a separate song of personal conversion that bears no resemblance to it.[1] Larry Conger gives "The Old Ship Of Zion" a DAD-tuning arrangement in his Fingers Of Steel American Spirituals Tab Book, where it sits alongside "Steal Away," "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" and other spirituals.[3]
Sources
- Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: 'Tis the Old Ship of Zion".
- Internet Archive: "Slave Songs of the United States" (1867).
- Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, American Spirituals Tab Book".
- Image: Albert Ernest Markes, Ship at Sea, watercolor, late 19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.