Jesus Loves Me: A Song History

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The words of "Jesus Loves Me" were written in 1859 by Anna Bartlett Warner (1820–1915)[1] and first printed in Say and Seal (1860), a novel whose title page names no one but credits the authors of The Wide, Wide World and Dollars and Cents, that is, Anna and her sister Susan Warner[2]; some accounts describe it simply as Susan's novel[3]. In the story, a Sunday school teacher sings the verses to comfort a gravely ill boy[1][3]. The two sisters made their home close to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, and gave Sunday school lessons to its cadets[3].

Colour print of Jesus blessing a group of small children

Christ Blessing Little Children, chromolithograph published by Howe & Middleton, Cincinnati, 1869. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The melody came from William B. Bradbury (1816–1868), who set Warner's stanzas in 1861 and added a refrain whose words come back to the start of the first stanza[4][3]. It was published in his Sunday school collection The Golden Shower (1862), where it appears as number 68[5]. A United Methodist hymn history calls the tune a "childlike pentatonic melody"[3], and some hymnals list it as CHINA, a name presumably owed to its popularity with missionaries there[4]. Hymnary.org now counts the text in more than 700 hymnals[1], and the United Methodist Hymnal prints it in several languages, among them Spanish, Cherokee, German and Japanese[3]. A much-repeated story says the theologian Karl Barth summed up his life's work with the song's first lines, though accounts of where it happened differ and the tale may be apocryphal[3].

The hymn has also found a place in dulcimer repertoire: Stephen Seifert includes it among the 68 hymns and gospel songs arranged in DAD tuning for mountain dulcimer in Join the Jam: Gospel Edition[6].

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "Jesus Loves Me" (text by Anna Bartlett Warner).
  2. Project Gutenberg: "Say and Seal, Volume I, by Susan Warner and Anna Bartlett Warner".
  3. Discipleship Ministries (United Methodist Church): "History of Hymns: Jesus Loves Me".
  4. Hymnary.org: "JESUS LOVES ME (Bradbury)".
  5. Hymnary.org: "Bradbury's Golden Shower of S.S. Melodies (1862), page 67".
  6. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam Gospel Edition".