420. I Feel Like Traveling On

The Story Behind the Hymn

'I Feel Like Traveling On' was written by William Hunter, a Methodist minister and prolific hymn writer, in 1838, and it grew into a favorite of the nineteenth-century American camp meeting tradition, the large outdoor revival gatherings, especially common on the expanding frontier, where simple, highly singable hymns were developed for crowds gathering across denominational lines, often without printed hymnals in hand.

Though credited to Hunter, the hymn circulated for decades through camp meeting singing before shape-note musician James D. Vaughan set it to the rolling tune most familiar today, a common pattern by which an individually authored text became, in practice, part of a shared, communal singing tradition associated especially with early American Methodist revivalism.

The hymn's structure builds each verse around the same picture, a distant, unmistakably real heavenly home, before returning every time to its central, driving refrain: 'I feel like traveling on.'

That refrain frames the Christian life explicitly as ongoing motion rather than settled waiting, describing not just hope for heaven but active, felt momentum toward it, a theme well suited to a hymn tradition associated with mobile, itinerant preaching and travel.

Its imagery of a home with 'glittering towers' outshining the sun draws on the broader nineteenth-century hymn tradition of picturing heaven in concrete architectural terms, gates, streets, mansions, giving abstract hope a vivid, almost touchable shape.

The hymn's simple, repetitive chorus, built for enthusiastic group singing, made it especially suited to the outdoor, informal setting of camp meetings, where new participants could join in confidently after hearing the refrain only once.

It remained a staple of Methodist and broader revival hymnody well into the twentieth century, valued for the way its restless, forward-moving refrain gave believers language for eagerness rather than only patience while waiting for heaven's promises.