Blessed Redeemer: A Song History

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A 1981 Christianity Today profile of the poet Avis B. Christiansen dates her work with Harry Dixon Loes on “Blessed Redeemer” to 1920 and says Loes had already written both the tune and the title before she supplied the words.[1] The Loes biography on Hymnary.org reports that the melody came to him while he listened to a sermon on Christ’s atonement titled “Blessed Redeemer,” and that he sent the tune and title to Christiansen, a longtime friend, asking her for a text; that page credits the account to a church website rather than to Loes himself.[2] The Cyber Hymnal likewise notes that she wrote the words at Loes’s request once the tune was finished.[3]

Engraving of Christ carrying the cross amid a crowd of soldiers and horsemen

Martin Schongauer, Christ Carrying the Cross, engraving, ca. 1475–80. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

Both writers moved in Chicago’s Moody circle: Loes, born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, took his middle name from A. C. Dixon, then pastor of the Moody Church, studied at Moody Bible Institute, and after years as a church musician and evangelist joined the institute’s music faculty in 1939.[2] The Discography of American Historical Recordings gives his dates as October 20, 1892, to February 9, 1965, and the biographical text on Hymnary.org agrees on 1892, although that page’s own heading lists his birth year as 1895, so sources differ.[4][2] Christiansen, born Avis Burgeson in 1895, spent her whole life in Chicago, attended the Moody Church, married Ernest Christiansen (later a Moody vice president) in 1917, wrote under several pen names, and died in 1985.[5] According to Christianity Today, she joined Moody after finishing high school in 1915, and there she heard Loes, then a Moody Bible Institute student, perform one of his own songs together with his sister.[1]

The hymn was printed in 1920 as No. 117 in Songs of Redemption, a book edited by W. Plunkett Martin and James W. Jelks and issued in Atlanta by the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention; Hymnary.org’s Loes biography calls this its first appearance.[6][7][2] On March 14, 1928, Maury Pearson recorded a “Blessed Redeemer” for Brunswick as a vocal solo with piano, with Loes credited as composer.[4] Hymnary.org now lists the text in 88 hymnals and indexes Loes’s tune under the name REDEEMER.[8]

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Sources

  1. Christianity Today: Richard D. Dinwiddie, "Refiner's Fire: Her Hymns Are Poetry Put to Music" (1981).
  2. Hymnary.org: "Harry Dixon Loes".
  3. Hymnary.org (The Cyber Hymnal #569): "Blessed Redeemer".
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Harry Dixon Loes".
  5. Hymnary.org: "Avis B. Christiansen".
  6. Hymnary.org: "Blessed Redeemer" (Songs of Redemption, 1920, #117).
  7. Hymnary.org: "Songs of Redemption" (1920).
  8. Hymnary.org: "Up Calvary's mountain one dreadful morn".