All Hail The Power: A Song History

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"All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name" began as an anonymous hymn by Edward Perronet, an English preacher who was for a time a close associate of the Wesleys before parting from them.[1][2][3] Its opening stanza was printed with a new tune in the Gospel Magazine in November 1779, and the complete text followed there in April 1780, still unsigned.[1][3] Perronet's authorship was later traced partly through his anonymous 1785 collection Occasional Verses, Moral and Sacred, which contained the hymn alongside an acrostic spelling out his name.[1] The form found in most hymnals today rests on a revision by John Rippon, who in his 1787 Selection of Hymns dropped three of Perronet's stanzas, revised much of what he kept, contributed two new stanzas, and headed the whole "The Spiritual Coronation."[1][2][3]

A mahogany chamber pipe organ with gilt display pipes above a keyboard

Thomas Appleton, Pipe Organ, 1830. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A Boston-built chamber organ from a generation after CORONATION was published; it is not Oliver Holden's organ.

Three tunes have carried the hymn. MILES LANE, the original 1779 setting, was the work of William Shrubsole, who was nineteen at the time and had sung as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral; in its first form the repeated calls to crown Christ passed from one voice part to another, and the tune is more familiar to English congregations than to American ones.[1][4] CORONATION, by Oliver Holden of Charlestown, Massachusetts, appeared in his Union Harmony (Boston, 1793), and the Psalter Hymnal Handbook, as reproduced on Hymnary.org, calls it "the one eighteenth-century American tune that has enjoyed uninterrupted popularity."[1][5] DIADEM, a more elaborate choral tune, was written in 1838 by James Ellor, a nineteen-year-old hatmaker by training who led the choir of the Wesleyan chapel in Droylsden, England, and who later emigrated to America.[1][2][3][6]

Holden himself had little formal schooling and worked as a carpenter, real-estate dealer, singing-school teacher, lay preacher, and Massachusetts legislator.[1][5][7] A Boston Public Library catalog record states that his organ and portrait were left to the Bostonian Society in 1889 under his granddaughter's will, and notes accompanying that pre-1925 lantern slide place the organ in Boston's Old State House; the Hymnology Archive also locates both items there and says CORONATION was composed on that instrument.[7][8] His gravestone in Charlestown names him as the tune's composer.[1] All three tunes remain in use, though Discipleship Ministries notes that MILES LANE sees less use than its more spirited alternatives and is absent from The United Methodist Hymnal.[2]

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Sources

  1. Hymnology Archive: "All hail the power of Jesus' name".
  2. Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: 'All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name'".
  3. Hymnary.org: "All hail the power of Jesus' name".
  4. Hymnary.org: "MILES LANE".
  5. Hymnary.org: "CORONATION".
  6. Hymnary.org: "DIADEM".
  7. Hymnology Archive: "Oliver Holden".
  8. Digital Commonwealth / Boston Public Library: "Oliver Holden organ and portrait".