Not much info on "Michael" is known (see this thread: Michael Row the Boat Ashore). The earliest printed version is in William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison's Slave Songs of the United States (New York: A. Simpson & Co., 1867; see No. 31 [p. 23], and comment [p. xvi]). Allen heard it as a boat song on Mar. 20, 1863 and Feb. 13, 1864; quotations from his diaries are in Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals (University of Illinois Press, 1977, pp. 290 and 352).

~Masato