Blessed Quietness: A Song History

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The words of "Blessed Quietness" are by Manie Payne Ferguson (1850–1932), who was born in County Carlow, Ireland, and in 1883 married Theodore Pollock Ferguson, a minister of the United Presbyterian Church who had taken up itinerant preaching.[1] In 1886 the couple founded the Peniel Mission in Los Angeles, a holiness rescue mission open to all denominations whose work reached up and down the West Coast and overseas, faltered as Pentecostalism gained ground after the 1906 Azusa Street Revival, and ended in 1949.[1] The hymnologist C. Michael Hawn hears in its run of similes a picture of what the Holy Spirit does for those who have been sanctified, and he ranks it as the Holiness Movement's best-known hymn.[1]

Painting of a small boat tossed on a stormy green sea, its passengers in alarm while a haloed figure sleeps

Eugène Delacroix, Christ Asleep during the Tempest, oil on canvas, ca. 1853. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the hymn.

Sources differ on the date of the words.[1][2] The Chalice Hymnal (1995), for one, dates the words about 1897, but Hymnary.org lists the text as number 24 in The Highway Hymnal, edited by Isaiah Reid and George L. Brown and published in Nevada, Iowa, in 1886, where it was printed as words only, without a tune.[2][3][1] The music has a tangled history: William J. Kirkpatrick copyrighted a setting in 1897, possibly the earliest, but the tune now sung is credited to W. S. Marshall, an otherwise obscure figure, and early books printed it without his name or under other people's copyrights.[1][4] An early pairing of words and tune is number 49 in The Revival No. 3 (Atlanta, 1899), in an arrangement credited to J. H. Fillmore, while the hymnologist Donald P. Hustad named Pentecostal Hymns, No. 3 (Chicago, 1902) as the first.[1][5] In most current books the arrangement is credited to James M. Kirk (1854–1945).[1][6]

Hymnary.org lists the text in 200 hymnals, and Hawn notes its continued place in recent African American and evangelical books such as the African American Heritage Hymnal (2001), Celebrating Grace (2010), and Total Praise (2011).[7][1] Maureen Sellers includes it, with melody and harmony parts in DAD tuning, in Simply Duets, a 123-page collection of older songs arranged as mountain dulcimer duets, published by Fingers Of Steel.[8]

Our books that contain the song "Blessed Quietness"

Sources

  1. Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: 'Joys Are Flowing Like a River' ('Blessed Quietness')".
  2. Hymnary.org: "Chalice Hymnal #267: Blessed Quietness".
  3. Hymnary.org: "The Highway Hymnal" (1886).
  4. Hymnary.org: "BLESSED QUIETNESS (Marshall)".
  5. Hymnary.org: "The Revival No. 3 #49: Blessed Quietness".
  6. Hymnary.org: "Revival Hymns and Choruses #242: Blessed Quietness".
  7. Hymnary.org: "Blessed Quietness" (Joys are flowing like a river).
  8. Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, Simply Duets".
  9. Image: Eugène Delacroix, Christ Asleep during the Tempest, oil on canvas, ca. 1853. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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