Wayfaring Stranger will not give you any problem, it has been done by dozens of artists.

Here is some background from one of my favorite sites.

Wayfaring Stranger

The American Revolution meant not only the promise of freedom from British rule, for many it also meant the promise of religious freedom. The Revolution of 1776 marked the first instance in the history of Christendom that a people had won full liberty in the religious phase of their culture. Membership in the Protestant faiths mushroomed between the years 1783 and 1800.

These worshippers were not only religious radicals, but they were also carrying out a musical revolution. They needed songs to match their soaring emotions. The result was they threw out the old Psalms and, as had happened in every revolution in the Christian church, brought folk tunes into the hymn books. Ballad tunes, jigs, marches and love songs were again put into the service of the Lord solemnly dressed up with religious texts that spoke directly to the woes and problems of the individuals who sang them.

The makers of hymnals collected and compiled these new songs into the shaped note system of notation where the notes on the page were distinguished by their shape as well as their position. In the early 1800s this singing tradition took root as The Sacred Harp movement. The Sacred Harp singing movement once involved hundreds of thousands of singers in its meetings and to this day these gatherings still produce a most remarkable type of American singing.

The meetings were, and are run in strict parliamentary fashion with every singer given the opportunity to lead two or three songs. The songs are arranged for four part harmony singing and the singers form themselves into a hollow square pattern - basses, altos, tenors and trebles on their respective sides. The leader gives the number of the hymn he prefers, and after the gathering has rustled through their fat Sacred Harp book to find the proper page, the leader intones a pitch, leads the congregation in a run through of the tune, and the group is off, singing in four part harmony at the top of their lungs.

Wayfaring Stranger falls into the category of religious ballad and is a song for solo performance at a religious meeting or for group shaped-note singing.

The song began to reach widespread popularity with secular, urban audiences when folk song collector, singer, and actor Burl Ives recorded it in the early 1940s--one of the earliest interpretive commercial folk recordings. Ives is an important figure in the popularization of folk music in the mid-1900s and was an artistic contemporary of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger before heading to Hollywood in the 1950s to pursue a film career. For a time, Wayfaring Stranger was synonymous with Ives' grandfatherly image and he sung it throughout his life as one of his signature pieces (Blue-Tailed Fly was another).

Wayfaring Stranger has remained popular with rural people throughout the South and it is certainly one of the most recognizable songs in the Anglo hymn tradition.

Sources:
Folk Song USA, Alan Lomax, Editor, New American Library.
All Music Guide
Above copy purloined from: http://www.oldtownschool.org/Resource/songnotes_W.html