He Leadeth Me: A Song History
The words are by Joseph H. Gilmore (1834–1918), a Baptist minister who in 1862 was filling in for a few Sundays at the First Baptist Church in Philadelphia. His own account, as given in the Psalter Hymnal Handbook, places the hymn's origin at a midweek service on March 26 of that year, when he took the Twenty-third Psalm as his subject; after the meeting he wrote out the verses in pencil on his sermon notes and handed them to his wife, then thought nothing further of them.[1] Without his knowledge she submitted them to the Boston periodical Watchman and Reflector, where they were first printed on December 4, 1862.[1][2] Gilmore was ordained that same year, later served churches in New Hampshire and New York, and taught English at the University of Rochester from 1868 until his retirement in 1911.[1]
Asher Brown Durand, The Beeches, 1845. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
The familiar tune is William B. Bradbury's. After finding the poem in the Watchman and Reflector, he set it to music, reshaped it into stanzas with a refrain, contributed the refrain's last line himself, and published it in his collection The Golden Censer in 1864.[1][3] Gilmore's original refrain had only two lines; the four-line form that became standard, found for example in P. Phillips's Singing Pilgrim (1866), was extended by a writer whose name is not known.[2] Hymnary.org's database counts the text in more than 1,400 hymnals, and the Psalter Hymnal Handbook describes Bradbury's melody as a gospel tune in a typical verse-and-refrain pattern with simple harmony.[2][3] Among dulcimer players, it is one of the 68 hymn and gospel titles in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam: Gospel Edition, arranged in DAD tuning.[4]
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