Leaning On The Everlasting Arms: A Song History
The hymn grew out of a letter of condolence. Anthony J. Showalter, a Virginia-born music teacher who had been leading shape-note singing schools since his early teens,[1] heard from two former pupils whose wives had died, and while drafting his reply he was drawn to the verse in Deuteronomy 33:27 about the “everlasting arms.”[2] He worked the image into a melody and refrain, then sent the manuscript to Elisha A. Hoffman, an ordained minister who had worked for the Evangelical Association’s publishing house and the author of more than two thousand gospel songs, who supplied the stanzas.[2][3][4] Accounts of where the music took shape differ: Showalter’s own recollection, given to a hymn historian in the 1920s, puts him at a music normal in Hartselle, Alabama, while local traditions in north Georgia place it in a family parlor in Catoosa County after Sunday services at Old Stone Church, and Dalton’s First Presbyterian Church holds that its organist was among the first to play the song.[2]
Walker Evans, Church, Georgia, March 1936. Library of Congress, FSA/OWI collection. No known restrictions.
Publishing under his own imprint in Dalton, Georgia, Showalter issued in 1887 two almost identical songbooks, The Glad Evangel and The Song Evangel, each opening with the new song.[2] The tune, known in hymnals as SHOWALTER,[1] moves within a narrow compass of a sixth and reuses short melodic patterns, which helps singers pick it up by ear.[2] Hymnary.org now indexes the text in several hundred hymnals.[4]
The hymn has also had a life on screen. Composer Carter Burwell built his score for True Grit (2010) around it, citing its earlier, memorable use in The Night of the Hunter (1955), and Iris DeMent’s recording plays over that film’s closing credits.[5] For mountain dulcimer players, an arrangement appears in Stephen Seifert’s Join the Jam: Gospel Edition.[6]
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