I Need Thee Every Hour: A Song History

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Annie Sherwood Hawks (1835–1918), a New York native who began placing verse in newspapers at fourteen, wrote more than four hundred hymn texts, and this is the only one still in common use.[1] She was living in Brooklyn in 1872 when, by her own later account, the words came to her on a June morning in the midst of her chores at home.[1][2] Robert Lowry, a prominent gospel-song writer who had been pastor of her church, Hanson Place Baptist, from 1861 to 1869, supplied the tune, which hymnals list as NEED, and added the refrain.[1][2][3]

Acorn-shaped mahogany shelf clock with a painted glass panel

Forestville Manufacturing Company, Acorn Clock, mahogany, laminated, 1847–50. Shown in fun for the hymn's title; it has no connection to the hymn.

The hymn is said to have had its first public singing at the National Baptist Sunday School convention in Cincinnati in November 1872, although, according to the Hymnology Archive, the convention's minutes, which recorded the songs presented, do not name it.[3][2] The Hymnology Archive also reports that it was included in New Sacred Songs, a songbook William H. Doane edited for that convention, but the site's editor could not locate a surviving copy.[2] Its first wide publication came in 1873 in Royal Diadem for the Sunday School, a Biglow & Main collection compiled by Lowry and Doane.[3][2] The evangelistic singer Ira Sankey adopted the hymn for the Moody revival meetings, recalling that he first sang it in London's East End, and it appeared in Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs in 1875.[2]

Hawks's husband, Charles, died in Brooklyn in 1888.[2] Looking back near the end of her life, she called the hymn "prophetic rather than expressive of my own experience," saying its comfort became clear to her only after that later sorrow; her account appears in Charles H. Gabriel's The Singers and Their Songs (1916).[2][1] The hymn is still sung today and appears as No. 397 in The United Methodist Hymnal.[1] Larry Conger includes it in Hymns, Spirituals, And Sacred Songs, a collection of classic gospel tunes for mountain dulcimer, published by Fingers Of Steel.[4]

Our book that contains the song "I Need Thee Every Hour"

Sources

  1. Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: I Need Thee Every Hour".
  2. Hymnology Archive: "I need thee every hour".
  3. Hymnary.org: "I Need Thee Every Hour".
  4. Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, Hymns, Spirituals, And Sacred Songs".
  5. Image: Forestville Manufacturing Company, Acorn Clock, mahogany, laminated, 1847–50. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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