A Child Of The King: A Song History

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The words of "A Child of the King" are by Harriet E. (Hattie) Buell, a New York writer who lived in Manlius until 1898, kept a summer home at Thousand Island Park, and contributed poems to the Northern Christian Advocate of Syracuse.[1] Her poem appeared in that paper in February 1877 under the title "The Child of a King."[2][3] John B. Sumner set the verses to music, and his tune, also dated 1877, is known as BINGHAMTON.[1][4]

Wide Dutch landscape under a cloudy sky, with a road winding across flat country toward a distant estate and fields

Philips Koninck, A Panoramic Landscape with a Country Estate, oil on canvas, ca. 1649. Shown for its broad view of houses and lands; it has no connection to the hymn.

How the hymn came to be written is known, in the sources consulted here, only through anecdote: hymn-story books of 1962 and 1990, cited in a Grace Evangelical Society article, relate that Buell composed the lines while walking home from church one Sunday, that Sumner set them without her knowledge, and that she was surprised to hear her poem sung at a Sunday evening service in Manlius.[3] Another account, given in Hymnary.org's notes, holds that Sumner had been praying for a gospel song to take the place of one his friend and teacher Philip Bliss, who had recently died, might have written, and took Buell's verses as that request granted.[2]

Gospel songbooks soon took the hymn up: Beulah Songs (1879) printed it with music credited to "Rev. John B. Sumner," and Gospel Hymns No. 5 included it in 1887.[5][6] Ira D. Sankey later gave it a place in his book on the stories behind the gospel hymns, retelling evangelist Peter P. Bilhorn's account of singing it from a wharf-boat to a crowd at Blunt, Dakota, during a trip up the Missouri River, and of a man who, when Bilhorn sang it again long afterward in Moody's church in Chicago, stood to say that hearing it at Blunt had led him to accept Christ.[7] Hymnary.org counts it in 449 hymnals, including the Baptist Hymnal of 1991.[1][8] Larry Conger arranges it in Hymns For Chromatic Mountain Dulcimer, a collection of sixteen gospel hymns for the chromatic mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[9]

Our book that contains the song "A Child Of The King"

Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "A Child of the King" (text).
  2. Hymnary.org: "A Child of the King" (Hymntime notes).
  3. Grace Evangelical Society: "A Hymn of Grace: I'm a Child of the King".
  4. Hymnary.org: "BINGHAMTON (Sumner)".
  5. Hymnary.org: "Beulah Songs (1879), No. 88: The Child of a King".
  6. Hymnary.org: "Gospel Hymns No. 5, No. 36: The Child of a King".
  7. Internet Archive: "My Life and the Story of the Gospel Hymns" (Ira D. Sankey).
  8. Hymnary.org: "Baptist Hymnal 1991, No. 555: A Child of the King".
  9. Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, Hymns For Chromatic Mountain Dulcimer".
  10. Image: Philips Koninck, A Panoramic Landscape with a Country Estate, oil on canvas, ca. 1649. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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