Blessed Assurance: A Song History
"Blessed Assurance" joins words by Fanny Crosby (1820–1915) to a melody by Phoebe Palmer Knapp (1839–1908), and both belong to 1873[1]. In that year the hymn reached print three times: in John R. Sweney's Gems of Praise, No. 1, issued in Philadelphia by the Methodist Episcopal Book-Room; on the back page of an issue of the New York periodical Guide to Holiness; and in Bible School Songs, which Knapp edited with J. H. Vincent[1][2]. Hymnals know the tune as ASSURANCE[3]. Knapp married at sixteen (her husband was among the founders of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company), gave much of her inheritance to charity after his death, and wrote more than five hundred gospel songs[4].
Peter Ilsted, Lady Playing the Piano, etching, 19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the hymn.
Crosby, blind from infancy and the author of more than eight thousand gospel texts, sometimes took her inspiration from a tune that already existed, and this hymn is one such case[2]. In Memories of Eighty Years (1906), an autobiography she dictated, she recalled that Knapp "played it over once or twice on the piano" and then asked what the music said to her, and that the opening words of the hymn were her reply[1]. An earlier book, Fanny Crosby's Life Story (1903), which her friend Will Carleton wrote in her voice, has Knapp simply bringing a finished tune and asking for a hymn to fit it; the Hymnology Archive points out that this version is not in Crosby's own words[1].
A lightly revised version appeared in Gospel Hymns No. 5 (Chicago: Biglow & Main, 1887), and that text became the standard hymnal form[1]; Discipleship Ministries calls the inclusion "perhaps the biggest boost" the hymn received and ties it to the hymn's heavy use at Moody and Sankey revival meetings on both sides of the Atlantic[2]. It was number 500 in Sankey's Sacred Songs and Solos, and Sankey recorded a story, told by a speaker at his 1900 London meeting, of soldiers in the Transvaal War greeting each other with hymn numbers[3][1]. It has been in Methodist hymnals since 1889 and is No. 369 in The United Methodist Hymnal[2], it was featured at Billy Graham's crusades, and Hymnary.org now counts it in more than twelve hundred hymnals[3].
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