Holy, Holy, Holy: A Song History
Reginald Heber (1783–1826) wrote this hymn during his years as vicar of Hodnet, an English parish he served from 1807, as part of a larger plan to supply a hymn for every Sunday of the church year.[1][2] It was his piece for Trinity Sunday, meant to be sung near the Nicene Creed in the service.[3] The text draws its imagery from the heavenly worship scenes of Isaiah 6 and Revelation 4, and it is unusual in that all sixteen of its lines close on the same rhyming vowel sound.[2][3]
Albrecht Dürer, Saint John before God and the Elders, woodcut from The Apocalypse. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
Heber did not live to see his hymns collected. He went to India as bishop of Calcutta in 1823 and died there in April 1826.[1] That same year the hymn was first printed in the third edition of A Selection of Psalms and Hymns for the Parish Church of Banbury, a book that apparently no longer survives.[2][3] It then appeared, in four stanzas and without music, in the posthumous collection Hymns Written and Adapted to the Weekly Church Service of the Year (London, 1827); a British Library manuscript copy from about 1820–1821 shows only small differences in wording.[2]
The melody nearly everyone now associates with the words came decades later. John Bacchus Dykes wrote the tune NICAEA for Hymns Ancient & Modern (1861), naming it for the church council of 325 that is linked with early statements of Trinitarian doctrine, and words and music have rarely been parted since.[4] The hymnologist Erik Routley ranked it as “the noblest of Dykes’s tunes.”[2] Hymnary.org indexes the text in well over a thousand hymnals,[3] and it is among the 68 hymns and gospel songs arranged for mountain dulcimer in Stephen Seifert’s Join the Jam: Gospel Edition.[5]
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