My Faith Looks Up To Thee: A Song History

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"My Faith Looks Up to Thee" is a hymn by Ray Palmer (1808–1887), who wrote it in 1830 while teaching in New York, not long out of college.[1][2] In an account quoted in Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology, Palmer recalled that the stanzas came easily and that he was in tears by the time he finished them.[2] Born in Little Compton, Rhode Island, and educated at Yale, he went on to be ordained in 1835 and served Congregational churches in Bath, Maine, and Albany, New York.[3][1]

A tree-lined Broadway with carriages and strollers leading to City Hall

Carl Fredrik Akrell, Broadway and City Hall in New York, etching and aquatint, 1824. Broadway in New York in the 1820s, the city where Ray Palmer wrote the hymn in 1830.

A popular telling of the hymn's history says Palmer carried the poem in a pocket notebook and ran into Lowell Mason by chance in Boston; Mason, then gathering material for a book with Thomas Hastings, took down a copy and is said to have composed a tune for it that same evening.[3] The book, Spiritual Songs for Social Worship, came out in 1831 with the hymn headed "Self Consecration," set to Mason's melody, which later took the name OLIVET.[2] Palmer's draft ran to six stanzas, of which four were published, and OLIVET has remained the tune sung with them.[1][3]

Hymnary.org counts the text in more than 2,400 hymnals and lists translations into Dutch, Polish, Spanish and Swahili.[1] The Haydn Quartet recorded it for Berliner in 1900, and versions followed on Victor and Columbia through the mid-1920s.[4] Larry Conger arranges it in DAD tuning in Hymns, Spirituals, And Sacred Songs, his collection of gospel songs for mountain dulcimer, published by Fingers Of Steel.[5]

Our book that contains the song "My Faith Looks Up To Thee"

Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "My Faith Looks Up to Thee".
  2. Hymnary.org: "Ray Palmer".
  3. Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: 'My Faith Looks Up to Thee'".
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Ray Palmer".
  5. Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, Hymns, Spirituals, And Sacred Songs".
  6. Image: Carl Fredrik Akrell, Broadway and City Hall in New York, etching and aquatint, 1824. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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