How Firm A Foundation: A Song History
“How Firm a Foundation” entered print in 1787, when the London Baptist pastor John Rippon included it, without music, in his A Selection of Hymns from the Best Authors. It ran to seven four-line stanzas under a heading drawn from 2 Peter about God’s great and precious promises, and the author was identified only as “K—.”[1] Who that was has never been settled. The leading candidate is Robert Keene, who led the singing at Rippon’s Carter Lane congregation and helped with Rippon’s tune book; an 1822 hymn collection indexed it under his name.[1][2] Later editors proposed a Kirkham, and a nineteenth-century claim for George Keith traced back to hearsay that the hymnologist John Julian dismissed; neither has strong support.[1][2] Rippon’s Selection itself went through many editions in England and one American printing in his lifetime.[3]
William Stanley Haseltine, Narragansett Bay, 1864. National Gallery of Art. Public domain (NGA Open Access).
In the United States the words found the tune they are now married to. The pentatonic melody known today as FOUNDATION first appeared, anonymously and under the name PROTECTION, in A Compilation of Genuine Church Music (1832), a shape-note book by Joseph Funk, a German Mennonite printer in the Shenandoah Valley near Harrisonburg, Virginia.[1][4] Funk’s book was the forerunner of his long-lived Harmonia Sacra, and the tune also found its way into other Southern shape-note books, among them The Sacred Harp (1844), which names it BELLEVUE, and Southern Harmony.[1][3][4] Many hymnals instead set the text to ADESTE FIDELES, the Christmas melody best known with “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” a pairing that has largely fallen away since the mid-twentieth century.[1]
The hymn has been reprinted extensively; Hymnary.org counts it in well over two thousand hymnals.[2] It is often remembered as a favorite of public figures, with accounts linking it to the deathbed of Andrew Jackson, the funeral of Robert E. Lee and the affections of Theodore Roosevelt.[3] For mountain dulcimer, it appears in Stephen Seifert’s Join the Jam: Gospel Edition, a book of 68 hymns and gospel songs in DAD tuning.[5]
Find books with How Firm A Foundation for sale →