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

Kantner could not be officially credited as one of the joint authors-composers of "Wooden Ships" on the original May 1969 release of Crosby, Stills & Nash, due to legal issues with Jefferson Airplane's then-manager, Matthew Katz, in which he was then embroiled. Crosby said, "Paul called me up and said that he was having this major duke-out with this horrible guy 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 also released by Kantner's band Jefferson Airplane in November 1969 on the album Volunteers. Both versions differ slightly in wording and melody.

Crosby recorded a solo demo in March 1968 with the melody but no lyrics. Stills recorded his own demo the following month with most of the lyrics in place.

Both Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young performed the song in their respective sets at the 1969 . However, the CSNY performance is better-known, as it was included in the and from the festival. The film's soundtrack uses the studio album version, while the soundtrack album has the live performance. Jefferson Airplane's performance – which ran to over 21 minutes in length and included several extended jam sections – remained unreleased until the 2009 set.

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