He Hideth My Soul: A Song History

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"He Hideth My Soul" pairs a text by Fanny Crosby with a tune by William J. Kirkpatrick, and Hymnary.org assigns both the words and the music to 1890.[1][2] Hymnary.org cites as its source The Finest of the Wheat No. 1, issued in Chicago by R. R. McCabe in 1890.[3] A scanned copy of The Finest of the Wheat, edited by George D. Elderkin, carries an 1890 copyright and prints the hymn as number 49, credited to Crosby and Kirkpatrick; the copy is marked as the seventy-first edition, so it is a later printing rather than the first.[4] Of the scripture passages Hymnary.org associates with the text, Exodus 33:18-23 heads the list.[1]

Painting of a narrow rocky gorge with a waterfall and a wooden walkway

Ralph Albert Blakelock, The Boulder and the Flume, oil on canvas, 1878. A rocky cleft, shown for the hymn's imagery; the painting has no connection to the hymn.

Crosby, blind from the age of six weeks, wrote thousands of hymns, and Kirkpatrick is among the composers Hymnary.org names as setting her words.[5] Kirkpatrick, a Duncannon, Pennsylvania, native born in 1838, was in the furniture trade until 1878 and then turned to music, leading the music at Philadelphia's Grace Methodist Church and putting together about a hundred gospel songbooks before he died in 1921.[6] Hymnary.org counts the hymn in 337 hymnals, among them the Baptist Hymnals of 1991 and 2008, the 1985 Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal, and Voices Together (2020).[1]

Larry Conger arranges it in DAD tuning in Hymns, Spirituals, And Sacred Songs, a 36-page collection of gospel tunes for mountain dulcimer that comes with an MP3 recording of each song, published by Fingers Of Steel.[7]

Our book that contains the song "He Hideth My Soul"

Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "A wonderful Savior is Jesus my Lord".
  2. Hymnary.org: "KIRKPATRICK (Kirkpatrick)".
  3. Hymnary.org: "He Hideth My Soul" (The Cyber Hymnal #2269).
  4. Internet Archive: "The Finest of the Wheat: Hymns New and Old for Missionary and Revival Meetings and Sabbath-Schools" (1890).
  5. Hymnary.org: "Fanny Crosby".
  6. Hymnary.org: "William J. Kirkpatrick".
  7. Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, Hymns, Spirituals, And Sacred Songs".
  8. Image: Ralph Albert Blakelock, The Boulder and the Flume, oil on canvas, 1878. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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