Wooden Ships

“Wooden Ships” is a song written and composed by David Crosby, Paul Kantner, and Stephen Stills, of which versions were recorded both by Crosby, Stills & Nash and by Jefferson Airplane. It was written in 1968 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on a boat named "Mayan" owned by Crosby, who composed the music, while Kantner and Stills wrote most of the lyrics.

Background

Kantner could not be officially credited as one of the joint authors-composers of "Wooden Ships" on the original release of Crosby, Stills & Nash (1969) due to legal issues. Crosby said, "Paul called me up and said that he was having this major duke-out with this horrible guy (Matthew Katz) who was managing the band, and he was freezing everything their names were on. ’He might injunct the release of your record,’ he told me. So we didn’t put Paul’s name on it for a while. In later versions, we made it very certain that he wrote it with us. Of course, we evened things up with him with a whole mess of cash when the record went huge." The song was released the same year by Kantner's band Jefferson Airplane, on the album Volunteers. Both versions are considered to be original versions of the song, although they differ slightly in wording and melody.