He Keeps Me Singing: A Song History
"He Keeps Me Singing" is the work of Luther B. Bridgers (1884–1948), a North Carolina–born minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.[1] He studied at Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, and later worked as a traveling evangelist across the southern United States.[2] Hymnals credit him with both words and music and name the tune SWEETEST NAME.[3] The song first appeared in 1910 in The Revival No. 6, a songbook issued in Atlanta by Charlie Tillman that carried eight of Bridgers's songs.[4] According to Hymnology Archive, the melody is adapted from Hans Engelmann's 1903 piano piece "The Melody of Love."[4]
John James Audubon, Song Sparrow, from The Birds of America, plate 25, hand-colored etching, aquatint and engraving, 1827–38. Shown for its songbird; it has no connection to the hymn.
The hymn has long been linked with a family tragedy.[4] In late March 1911, while Bridgers was preaching a revival in Middlesboro, Kentucky, his wife, Sallie, and their three small sons died in a house fire near Harrodsburg, where they were staying with her family.[4] Retellings often present the song as his response to that loss, but Discipleship Ministries treats that story as apocryphal, since the hymn was written in 1910, before the fire.[1] Hymnology Archive suggests the connection may have grown out of Bridgers's own testimony that he kept singing after his grief, while noting that what first prompted the song is unclear.[4] In 1914 he remarried and was named a General Evangelist of his church.[2]
Hymnary.org lists the hymn in 254 hymnals,[5] among them The United Methodist Hymnal of 1989, where it is No. 380.[3] Discipleship Ministries names Jake Hess, Slim Whitman and Babbie Mason among the singers who have recorded it.[1] Larry Conger includes 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.[6]
Sources
- Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: There's Within My Heart a Melody".
- Hymnary.org: "Luther B. Bridgers".
- Hymnary.org: "There's Within My Heart a Melody (The United Methodist Hymnal, 380)".
- Hymnology Archive: "He Keeps Me Singing".
- Hymnary.org: "He Keeps Me Singing".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, Hymns For Chromatic Mountain Dulcimer".
- Image: John James Audubon, Song Sparrow, from The Birds of America, plate 25, hand-colored etching, aquatint and engraving, 1827–38. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.