- Wooden Ships
Song infobox
Name = Wooden Ships
Type =
Artist =Crosby, Stills & Nash
alt Artist =
Album = Crosby, Stills & Nash
Published =
Released = 1969
track_no = 6
Recorded =
Genre = Rock
Length = 5:29
Writer =Stephen Stills Paul Kantner David Crosby
Composer = David Crosby
Label = Atlantic
Producer =Bill Halverson
David Crosby
Graham Nash
Stephen Stills
Background =
Tracks =
prev =
prev_no =
next = Lady of the Island
next_no = 7"Wooden Ships" is a
folk-rock song written byDavid Crosby ,Stephen Stills andPaul Kantner (ofJefferson Airplane fame) in the late 1960s. The song was written on Crosby's boat in Florida. Crosby wrote the music, and Stills and Kantner wrote most of the lyrics. [http://www.suitelorraine.com/suitelorraine/Pages/crosbyafawcett.html] .Kantner could not be credited on the original release of "Crosby, Stills & Nash" due to legal issues, but he is credited on the 2006 re-release. The song was also released by Jefferson Airplane the same year on the album "Volunteers". Both versions are considered to be original versions of the song, although they differ slightly in wording and melody.
Crosby recorded a solo demo in March 1968, with the melody but no lyrics at this stage. Stills recorded his own demo the following month with most of the lyrics now in place.
"Wooden Ships" was written at the height of the
Vietnam War , a time of great tension between the United States and theSoviet Union , nuclear-armed rivals in the Cold War. It was one of the few songs of that era that openly dealt with the ever-present fears of an apocalyptic nuclear war Fact|date=August 2008 (preceded byTom Lehrer 's "We Will All Go Together When We Go ", and "Eve of Destruction", sung byBarry McGuire ).Black Sabbath 's "Electric Funeral " also comments on the futility and danger of nuclear war.The song depicts the horrors confronting the survivors of a
nuclear holocaust , where presumably two sides have virtually annihilated each other (and everyone else). One man from each side stumbles upon the other, and they reflect on the pointlessness of the conflict.Fact|date=August 2008According to people who have seen Stills speak at music festivals, he has himself stated that the song is in fact about the
Holocaust in Europe during World War II. Although the obscure lyrics do not refer specifically to the events of the war, the story of the song can be interpreted as the meeting of two deserters or non-Jewish individuals from different countries who do not speak the same language but have both fled their European civilizations to avoid enforced participation in anti-Semitic violence. The lyric "silver people on the shoreline" likely refers to Nazi soldiers, and in the later lyrics, "horror grips us as we watch you die/ All we can do is echo your anguished cries,/ Stare as all human feelings die," echo the meaning that the speakers of the song are observing horrific calamity yet can do nothing to prevent it. These lyrics, also, do not reasonably fit in to a "post-apocalyptic" interpretation of the song.
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