At The Cross: A Song History
The verses of “At the Cross” are Isaac Watts’s “Alas! and Did My Saviour Bleed,” which first appeared in his Hymns and Spiritual Songs of 1707 in six four-line stanzas under a heading about godly sorrow over the sufferings of Christ; Julian’s Dictionary of Hymnology notes that it was reprinted as Book II, No. 9 in the enlarged edition of 1709.[1] In Watts’s original first stanza the singer calls himself a “worm,” and many later editors have avoided that self-description, even though it echoes biblical phrasing in Job and the Psalms.[1][2] Hymnals have also routinely dropped the second stanza and reworded the third, often substituting Christ for God or making its language gender-inclusive.[1]
Worthington Whittredge, The Camp Meeting, oil on canvas, 1874. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no direct connection to the hymn.
In 1885 Ralph E. Hudson (1843–1901), an Ohio evangelist and music publisher licensed to preach in the Methodist Episcopal Church, issued the hymn in his songbook Songs of Peace, Love, and Joy (Alliance, Ohio), attaching the refrain that gives the gospel version its name.[3] The stanza melody is considered Hudson’s own, but the refrain has a longer and murkier past, and sources differ on how much of it he wrote.[2][1] The Hymnology Archive traces the chorus to “Take Me Home,” a secular song by W. L. Bloomfield published in New York in 1853, for which Hermann L. Schreiner wrote a new tune in 1864, and then to a Christian parody that Salvation Army workers were singing in England by 1883; it considers the author of the refrain’s words unclear.[3][2] Hymnary.org notes that the hymnologist William J. Reynolds treated the refrain as a camp-meeting chorus Hudson merely borrowed, a case it considers somewhat weakened by the lack of any printing before 1885.[1]
Fanny Crosby later tied her own conversion to Watts’s text: in her 1906 memoir she recounts that on November 20, 1850, during autumn revival services at New York’s Thirtieth Street Methodist Church, she went forward by herself to pray and experienced a sudden spiritual breakthrough as the congregation sang the hymn’s line of self-dedication.[4] Today the words are sung both to MARTYRDOM, a Scottish melody adapted as a hymn tune by Hugh Wilson, and to Hudson’s setting, and Hymnary.org lists Watts’s text in more than 2,600 hymnals.[1] In the United States the hymn is commonly known through Hudson’s gospel setting, which often carries the refrain’s title, “At the Cross.”[2][1]
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