I Must Tell Jesus: A Song History
Elisha A. Hoffman (1839-1929), a Pennsylvania-born minister credited with more than two thousand hymns, supplied both the words and the music of "I Must Tell Jesus."[1][2] Hymnary.org dates the text to 1893, though its notes for worship leaders give 1894 as the year it was written.[2] In 1894 the hymn was published in three collections that Hoffman edited, alone or with others: Favorite Gospel Songs, where it carried an 1893 copyright in the name of the Hoffman Music Co., Pentecostal Hymns (Hope Publishing Co., Chicago), and Best Hymns.[3]
Jean-Jacques Henner, Young Woman Praying, oil on canvas. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the hymn.
The story of how it came to be written is Hoffman's own, printed by fellow gospel composer Charles H. Gabriel in The Singers and Their Songs (1916).[3] By that account, while he was pastor at Lebanon, Pennsylvania, Hoffman called on a woman in deep distress who cried out asking what she should do; he urged her to take all her troubles to Jesus, and she answered with the very words of the hymn's title.[3] Hoffman wrote that as he walked away he pictured a soul "transformed from darkness into light."[3]
The tune is known as ORWIGSBURG, after Hoffman's birthplace, a name assigned by the editors of the 1956 Baptist Hymnal.[3] Hymnary.org lists the song in more than four hundred hymnals.[2] Maureen Sellers includes it in Simply Gospel, Book Three, a collection of spirituals, hymns, and old-time gospel songs for novice to intermediate players, published by Fingers Of Steel.[4]
Sources
- Hymnology Archive: "Elisha Hoffman".
- Hymnary.org: "I must tell Jesus all of my trials".
- Hymnology Archive: "I must tell Jesus".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, Simply Gospel, Book Three".
- Image: Jean-Jacques Henner, Young Woman Praying, oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.