Hold To God's Unchanging Hand: A Song History

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The words of “Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand” came from Jennie Wilson, a hymn writer from northern Indiana who used a wheelchair for life after a spinal condition set in at age four, and who learned her lessons at home rather than in a schoolroom; Hymnary.org reports that she is said to have written upward of 2,200 texts.^[1] Sources differ on the hymn’s year: Hymnary.org dates the text to 1905,^[2] while the Cyber Hymnal points to New Hosannas, a 1906 collection edited by John E. Thomas for Quartet Music of Fort Worth, Texas, and credits the tune to Franklin L. Eiland.^[3] Set in 8.7.8.7 meter with a refrain, the stanzas weigh the fleeting things of this world against the constancy of God, with Hebrews 13:8 among the scriptures Hymnary links to it, and Hymnary.org counts it in 181 hymnals.^[2]

Black-and-white photograph of an Alabama farm family seated together singing hymns from songbooks

Walker Evans, Sunday Singing: Frank Tengle and family singing hymns, Hale County, Alabama, 1936. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The hymn reached records early. Crowd-sourced discographies list the Simmons Sacred Singers, a vocal quartet with organ, recording it for Okeh in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in September 1927, with the disc issued in 1928.^[4]^[5] Bluegrass musicians took it up later: in sessions that began in Baltimore on November 22, 1964, for broadcaster Ray Davis, the Stanley Brothers cut it as the opening track of an album issued on the Wango label in 1966 under the pseudonym John’s Gospel Quartet.^[6] SecondHandSongs also lists a Ry Cooder adaptation, “Archie’s Funeral,” on the 1980 soundtrack to The Long Riders.^[7] For mountain dulcimer players, it appears in Stephen Seifert’s gospel collection Join the Jam: Gospel Edition.^[8]

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