I Love To Tell The Story: A Song History

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The words of "I Love to Tell the Story" began as part of a long devotional poem by Katherine (Arabella Catherine) Hankey, an English evangelical from a Clapham banking family who taught Bible classes and wrote verse.[1][2] She wrote the poem in 1866 while recovering from a serious illness, and among its sections were "The Story Wanted" and "The Story Told."[1] The first of these became the source of the children's gospel song "Tell Me the Old, Old Story," while the second supplied the stanzas of this hymn, in which the singer describes the joy of retelling the gospel narrative to others.[1]

Etching of Christ standing in light, preaching to ordinary villagers and children gathered around him

Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ Preaching ('La Petite Tombe'), etching, c. 1652. Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The familiar melody, known in hymnals as HANKEY, is the work of William G. Fischer, a Baltimore-born musician who settled in Philadelphia, taught music at Girard College and co-owned a piano and music store.[2] Fischer also wrote the refrain that follows each stanza, and tune and refrain appeared together in Joyful Songs in 1869.[1][3] With its mostly conjunct melodic line, plain harmony and alternation of stanza and chorus, it is a characteristic gospel song, and the hymn spread widely through the revival campaigns of Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey; Hymnary.org notes that Fischer led a thousand-voice choir at their 1876 Philadelphia meetings.[3] The text has since been printed in well over a thousand hymnals, with translations into Spanish and Welsh.[1]

The hymn carried easily into the recording era: contralto Louise Homer recorded it with a male chorus for Victrola, on a disc the Internet Archive dates to 1919,[4] and Alan Jackson included it on Precious Memories (2006), a hymn album he first made as a Christmas gift for his mother.[5] It is also one of the songs in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam: Gospel Edition.[6]

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "I Love to Tell the Story" (text).
  2. Hymnary.org: "Psalter Hymnal (Gray) 530. I love to tell the story".
  3. Hymnary.org: "HANKEY (Fischer)".
  4. Internet Archive: "I Love to Tell the Story : Louise Homer and Male Chorus".
  5. AlanJackson.com: "Alan Jackson Re-Releases Gospel Album Precious Memories".
  6. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam Gospel Edition (Digital Product)".