Count Your Blessings: A Song History
"Count Your Blessings" joins a text by Johnson Oatman Jr. to a tune by Edwin O. Excell, and it first appeared in 1897 in Songs for Young People, a collection Excell edited for the Methodist Book Concern.[1] At the time Oatman, an ordained Methodist Episcopal minister, was a merchant in partnership with his father at Lumberton, New Jersey, while Excell, whose Chicago firm concentrated on Sunday school publications, was collaborating with the revivalist Sam P. Jones.[1] Hymnary.org lists the tune under the name BLESSINGS.[2]
Johan Christian Clausen Dahl, Norwegian Seacoast During a Storm, etching, open-bite, black ink, 1819. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.
In his 1914 biography of Oatman, J. H. Hall reported that most critics regarded the song as Oatman's finest work and wrote that "perhaps no American hymn was ever received with such enthusiasm in England" as this one.[3] As evidence, Hall cited a London daily's report of a meeting led by the evangelist Gypsy Smith, who, according to the paper, spoke of the song's popularity in South London.[3] Hall added that it was sung at every service of the revival in Wales, and that one leading daily printed it in full beside "The Glory Song."[3]
The song remains a hymnal staple: Hymnary.org counts it in more than 300 hymnals and lists translations into Dutch, French, Spanish and Swahili.[2] Lorinda Jones includes it in her Sacred Music Collection, which arranges 31 hymns, spirituals and gospel songs for mountain dulcimer, each with a vocal staff with lyrics, suggested chord changes and tablature in DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[4]
Sources
- Hymnology Archive: "Count Your Blessings".
- Hymnary.org: "Count Your Blessings".
- Hymnology Archive: "Johnson Oatman Jr.".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Lorinda Jones, Sacred Music Collection".
- Image: Johan Christian Clausen Dahl, Norwegian Seacoast During a Storm, etching, open-bite, black ink, 1819. The Cleveland Museum of Art.