“Old Ship of Zion” is, in its oldest form, a spiritual about a ship that carries its passengers to heaven, with Jesus as captain. It was printed in white-published collections from 1842, in Sacred Melodies, and the 1867 collection Slave Songs of the United States prints two versions of it, one of them reported as having been sung twenty-five years earlier by Black singers in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. The compilers noted that the two versions differed from each other and from the versions given by Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Later hymnals settled on a simpler version with the refrain “get on board,” sung to the melody of “Give Me That Old Time Religion.”
The ship image carried more than one meaning among enslaved people. The scholar William B. McClain wrote that the “ship of Zion” was one of the code names for escape to the North, and that the refrain “Git on board” summoned those ready to go; in a letter to her family, Harriet Tubman told her brothers to be ready to step on board when “the good old ship of Zion comes along.” As that coded meaning faded, the song’s message about heaven came to the fore, and it became a common funeral selection.
Several other songs share the title. The gospel writer Thomas A. Dorsey published an “Old Ship of Zion” in 1950 that quotes the spiritual’s refrain; M. J. Cartwright’s gospel song “The Old Ship of Zion,” set to a tune by Daniel B. Towner, is a personal conversion song unrelated to it. In bluegrass, Ralph Stanley recorded an “Old Ship of Zion” credited to himself for his 1992 album Almost Home (Rebel), recorded at Maggard Studio in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. Its lyric has a traveller on the river bank who sees a battered ship, hears its captain call him aboard, and steps on to leave his troubles behind. The Forbes Family sang a version credited as traditional on their 1984 Rebel album Gleams of That Golden Morning.
