In The Sweet By And By: A Song History

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"In the Sweet By and By" was written by two men from Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Sanford Fillmore Bennett wrote the words and Joseph Philbrick Webster the music, and hymnals give the hymn and its tune the year 1868.[1][2] Webster, born in New Hampshire in 1819, had built a music career in Boston and New York before settling in Elkhorn in the 1850s (sources differ on the exact year). He was already well known for the parlor song "Lorena."[3][2] Bennett, born in Eden, New York, in 1836, had served as an officer in the Wisconsin Volunteers. After the Civil War he came back to Elkhorn, ran a drug store there and studied medicine, and he graduated from Rush Medical College in 1874.[4]

Early salted-paper photograph of a small stone country church

Unknown British photographer, Country Church, salted paper print, 1850s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

Bennett later described how the hymn came to be. As he told it, Webster walked into his place of business in low spirits and brushed off the question of what was wrong, saying things would be all right by and by. The phrase struck Bennett as the germ of a hymn, so he wrote out the verses on the spot, and Webster worked out a melody, trying it on his violin.[3][5] By Bennett's own reckoning, no more than half an hour passed before the two of them and a pair of friends were singing the new hymn together.[5] Accounts differ on the year: the local historical society places the scene in 1867.[3] The hymn was written for The Signet Ring, a collection of Webster's hymn tunes published in Chicago in 1868.[6]

The hymn went on to become what the University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries call "an enduring monument of religious Americana."[6] Hymnary.org counts the tune in more than 680 hymnals, among them books in Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Cheyenne, and the text has been translated into Dutch, Spanish and Swahili.[2][1] Webster died in Elkhorn in 1875, and many of his manuscripts had been lost in the 1871 Chicago Fire. His heirs went to court over royalties in 1906 and did not reach a settlement until 1921.[6] His Elkhorn house is now the museum of the Walworth County Historical Society, which displays the paper with Bennett's original lyrics.[3]

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "In the Sweet By and By".
  2. Hymnary.org: "SWEET BY AND BY (Webster)".
  3. Walworth County Historical Society: "Joseph P. Webster" (Webster House Museum).
  4. Hymnary.org: "S. Fillmore Bennett".
  5. Wikipedia: "In the Sweet By-and-By".
  6. University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries Digital Collections: "Joseph Philbrick Webster".