Brighten The Corner Where You Are: A Song History

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"Brighten the Corner Where You Are" is a gospel song with words by Ina Duley Ogdon[1] and music by Charles H. Gabriel.[2] Hymnary.org dates the text 1913 in its listing but 1912 in its note on the author, so the year of writing is uncertain.[1] Ogdon, who was born in Rossville, Illinois, in 1872 and died in Toledo, Ohio, in 1964, was raised in the Disciples of Christ and wrote more than three thousand hymns and other verses.[1]

White opaque glass oil lamp with a round font on a tall turned stem and square base, photographed against a gray background

New England Glass Company, Oil Lamp, pressed and free-blown white opaque glass, 1830–40. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

Homer Rodeheaver gave an account of how the song came about in his 1917 book Song Stories of the Sawdust Trail, though he does not name the author there.[3] In his telling, she had hoped to become a writer or to carry the Gospel abroad, but her days went to caring for her small son and her invalid father while her husband, a railway mail clerk, was often away.[3] He wrote that a struggling neighbor once told her how much the time spent in her home meant to her, and that this prompted her to devote herself to the small world she had, a change of heart from which the song grew.[3] The same chapter reports the chorus being sung by children at a remote mission station in Siam and, according to a newspaper correspondent, in the trenches of the First World War.[3]

For almost twenty years Rodeheaver was Billy Sunday's chief assistant, leading the choir and congregation in song at his revival meetings, and at a 1953 service in the Billy Sunday Tabernacle at Winona Lake, Indiana, he was still leading this song among popular numbers from those campaigns.[4] Writing on her Hymn for the Day site, Gracia Grindal calls it the signature song of the Sunday and Rodeheaver revivals.[5] Rodeheaver recorded it for Victor at Camden, New Jersey, on April 3, 1915, issued on Victor 17763.[2] The Discography of American Historical Recordings lists further versions by him for Columbia (1916 and 1926) and OKeh (1925), along with a 1917 Edison recording by the Apollo Quartet of Boston.[6] Ella Fitzgerald recorded it on her gospel album Brighten the Corner.[5]

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "Brighten the Corner Where You Are".
  2. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix B-15855. Brighten the corner where you are / Homer A. Rodeheaver".
  3. Internet Archive (Cornell University Library): Homer Rodeheaver, "Song Stories of the Sawdust Trail" (1917).
  4. Billy Graham Center Archives, Wheaton College: "Archives Bulletin".
  5. Hymn for the Day (Gracia Grindal): "Hymn 214 Brighten the Corner Where You Are".
  6. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Ina Duley Ogdon".