“I Feel Like Traveling On” is a gospel hymn whose words date to the first half of the nineteenth century. The text is credited to William Hunter, an Irish-born Methodist minister who came to America as a child and went on to write well over a hundred hymns; he is generally said to have written this one in 1838.
The hymn opens with the line “My heavenly home is bright and fair” — a title under which it has also circulated — and turns on the buoyant refrain about feeling like traveling on toward that home. The familiar melody was shaped in part through the Southern shape-note and gospel-songbook tradition, where the hymn became a favorite.
By the mid-twentieth century the song had moved into country and bluegrass gospel, sung with the brisk tempo and close harmony of the form.
