Let The Lower Lights Be Burning: A Song History

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Philip P. Bliss wrote both the words and the music of "Let the Lower Lights Be Burning," which Hymnary.org dates to 1871, with one of its entries citing The Charm of that year as a source.[1] Ira D. Sankey's 1907 memoir says the words came to Bliss after he heard Dwight L. Moody tell of a boat approaching Cleveland harbor on a stormy night, when only one light could be seen from the lighthouse because the lower lights had gone out.[2] In Moody's telling the pilot missed the channel and the boat broke up on the rocks with many lives lost, and he drew the moral that the Master tends the great lighthouse while believers must keep the lower lights lit.[2] Sankey's account names neither the vessel nor a date, and none of the sources consulted here identifies the wreck.[2]

Engraving of a lighthouse on a pier with sailing ships in rough water

Pierre Eugène Aubert, Lighthouse in Cleveland, Ohio, on Lake Erie, engraving, c. 1839–41. Cleveland's lighthouse, shown for the harbor in Moody's story; the print has no connection to the wreck he described.

Bliss, born in Pennsylvania in 1838, had been urged by Moody in 1868 to become a singing evangelist, and with Sankey he published the popular Gospel Hymns series.[3] He and his wife died near the end of 1876, when the train carrying them to sing at Moody's Chicago Tabernacle was wrecked and burned at Ashtabula, Ohio.[3] The hymn long outlived him: at the time of writing Hymnary.org indexes it in more than 680 hymnals and records translations into German, Spanish, Swedish and Arabic, among other languages.[1] Autoharp players, rather than dulcimer players, will find it in The Doofus - Occasional Number 2 - 18 Traditional Gospel Favorites For Autoharp, a sheet-music collection arranged by Neal Walters and Heidi Cerrigione, who play together in a band called The Doofus.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Let The Lower Lights Be Burning"

Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "Let the Lower Lights Be Burning".
  2. Internet Archive: "My Life and the Story of the Gospel Hymns and of Sacred Songs and Solos" (Ira D. Sankey, 1907).
  3. Hymnary.org: "Philip Bliss".
  4. Neal Walters: "The Doofus, Occasional Number 2 - 18 Traditional Gospel Favorites For Autoharp".
  5. Image: Pierre Eugène Aubert, Lighthouse in Cleveland, Ohio, on Lake Erie, engraving, c. 1839–41. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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