It Is Well With My Soul: A Song History

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The words of "It Is Well With My Soul" come from Horatio Gates Spafford (1828–1888), a Chicago lawyer who also served as a trustee of the city's Presbyterian Theological Seminary of the Northwest.[1] In late 1873 his wife Anna and their four daughters sailed for Europe aboard the French liner Ville du Havre, while he stayed behind in Chicago to deal with financial matters in the wake of the Great Fire of 1871.[1][2] On 22 November the steamer was struck by the British ship Loch Earn and went down; more than two hundred people died, among them Annie, Maggie, Bessie and Tanetta Spafford, and Anna was one of only 87 survivors.[3][2] The Library of Congress holds the telegram in which she told her husband she had been "saved alone."[2]

Early photograph of a two-masted sailing ship resting on a calm, sunlit sea under a luminous sky

Gustave Le Gray, Brig on the Water, albumen silver print, 1856. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

Exactly when the verses were written is less certain than the familiar story suggests. A popular version has Spafford composing them at sea as his own ship passed the place where his children drowned, but the accounts given by family members and by Sankey do not agree: Anna remembered him writing the hymn soon after the news reached him, their daughter Bertha (born in 1879, years after the disaster) placed it on the ocean crossing, and the singer Ira D. Sankey dated it to 1876, back in Chicago.[4][3] Spafford's undated working manuscript, written on Chicago hotel stationery and showing his revisions, survives in the American Colony in Jerusalem Collection at the Library of Congress.[4][2]

The music is by Philip P. Bliss, a friend of the family, who named the tune VILLE DU HAVRE after the lost ship.[1][5] Sankey recalled that Bliss himself first sang the hymn at a meeting in Chicago's Farwell Hall, an event the Library of Congress places in November 1876, and the song appeared that year in Gospel Hymns No. 2, compiled by Sankey and Bliss.[4][3][1] Bliss did not live to see its spread; he died weeks later in the railway disaster at Ashtabula, Ohio.[6] Spafford moved his family to Jerusalem in 1881 and founded the American Colony there.[1] Hymnary.org now indexes the tune in nearly five hundred hymnals, and one hymnal handbook advises that it is "best sung in harmony throughout."[5] Mountain dulcimer players will find it among the hymn arrangements in DAD tuning in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam: Gospel Edition.[7]

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: text page for "It Is Well with My Soul".
  2. Library of Congress, American Colony in Jerusalem: "Saved Alone".
  3. Library of Congress, American Colony in Jerusalem Timeline: "1873 to 1881".
  4. Hymnology Archive: "It is well with my soul".
  5. Hymnary.org: "VILLE DU HAVRE".
  6. Hymnary.org: "Philip Bliss".
  7. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam Gospel Edition".