He Included Me: A Song History

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The words of "He Included Me" are by Johnson Oatman Jr. (1856–1922), a New Jersey Methodist local preacher who worked in his father's mercantile business and later in life insurance, and who is credited with more than three thousand hymn texts.[1] Hymnary.org dates the text to 1909 and links it to a single tune.[2] That tune, also dated 1909, is by Hampton H. Sewell (1874–1937), for whom Hymnary.org has no biography, though it lists more than a dozen other texts under his name as author or arranger.[3][4] The earliest hymnals indexed there, from 1914 through the 1920s, credit the music to "Hamp Sewell."[5]

Watercolor of a family in early 1800s dress walking along a brick wall outside a Philadelphia meeting house on a Sunday morning

John Lewis Krimmel, Sunday Morning in front of the Arch Street Meeting House, Philadelphia, watercolor, black ink, and graphite on white laid paper, 1811–ca. 1813. Shown for its Sunday churchgoers; it has no connection to the hymn.

The song was printed in many church and revival songbooks of the 1910s and 1920s, such as Crowns (1915) and Treasury of Song (1917), and Hymnary.org counts it in more than a hundred hymnals in all.[6][7][5][2] Later hymnals, among them the Baptist Hymnal of 1991, give the tune the name SEWELL.[3][8] Larry Conger arranges it in Hymns For Chromatic Mountain Dulcimer, a collection of sixteen gospel hymns for the chromatic mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[9]

Our book that contains the song "He Included Me"

Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "Johnson Oatman".
  2. Hymnary.org: "He Included Me" (text).
  3. Hymnary.org: "He Included Me" (tune, Sewell).
  4. Hymnary.org: "Hampton H. Sewell".
  5. Hymnary.org: "He Included Me" (tune, all instances).
  6. Hymnary.org: "Crowns (1915), No. 63: He Included Me".
  7. Hymnary.org: "Treasury of Song (1917), No. 83: He Included Me".
  8. Hymnary.org: "Baptist Hymnal 1991, No. 436: He Included Me".
  9. Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, Hymns For Chromatic Mountain Dulcimer".
  10. Image: John Lewis Krimmel, Sunday Morning in front of the Arch Street Meeting House, Philadelphia, watercolor, black ink, and graphite on white laid paper, 1811–ca. 1813. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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