Blest Be The Tie: A Song History
"Blest Be the Tie That Binds" is by John Fawcett (1740-1817), an English Baptist minister, and its documented history begins with his collection Hymns Adapted to the Circumstances of Public Worship and Private Devotion (1782).[1][2] There, as Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology records, it was No. 104, ran to six stanzas and bore the heading "Brotherly Love."[1] Most of the book's 166 hymns were written to be sung after a sermon.[2] Fawcett had settled with the small Baptist congregation at Wainsgate, in Yorkshire, in the mid-1760s.[1][3] After the London minister John Gill died in 1771, Fawcett was offered his pulpit at Carter Lane, and an 1818 memoir reports that he sold furniture and books to prepare for the move but chose to stay.[3]
Quilt, Album pattern, First Reform Churches of Fishkill and Hopewell, cotton, ca. 1855–60. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). An album quilt made in the name of two church congregations, shown for the hymn’s theme of fellowship; it has no connection to the hymn.
Whether that decision prompted the hymn is less certain. Josiah Miller's Singers and Songs of the Church (1869) told the now-familiar story of loaded wagons and a weeping congregation that persuaded Fawcett to stay.[1] Julian noted that the 1818 life of Fawcett, his collected writings and his funeral sermon say nothing of the hymn being written in those circumstances, though he thought the hymn itself lent the account some support.[1] Hymnary.org treats the tale as popular but not fully trustworthy, and a Discipleship Ministries "History of Hymns" article finds fact and legend hard to separate at this point.[1][2] Hymnology Archive adds that Fawcett lost a son, his mother, a daughter and several close friends between 1774 and 1785, which may help explain the hymn's hope of reunion.[3]
The earliest printing with music that Hymnology Archive reports is in John Rippon's tune book, where Thomas Walker set the words to VERMONT.[3] Today the hymn is usually sung to DENNIS, which Lowell Mason arranged and first published in The Psaltery (1845), the book he compiled with George Webb, crediting the tune to Hans Georg Nägeli without naming a source.[3][4] Hymnology Archive suggests it is more an homage to Nägeli than a borrowing and traces its pairing with Fawcett's words to at least the 1870s, while Mason's BOYLSTON, first printed in 1832, was matched with them by 1868.[3][5] Modern hymnals usually print four of the six stanzas, the fourth serving as a benediction.[3] Hymnary.org lists the text in 2,606 hymnals, and the Discipleship Ministries writer believes it has been sung "upon parting" more than any other hymn.[1][2]
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