My Jesus, I Love Thee: A Song History
"My Jesus, I Love Thee" is usually credited to William Ralph Featherston (1846–1873) of Montreal[1], who is said to have written it as a teenager around the time of his religious conversion[2]. That attribution traces back to a single account: Mrs. E. Featherston Wilson, described as his aunt, told the evangelist Ira Sankey that she still kept a copy in the young man's handwriting, and Sankey printed the story in My Life and Sacred Songs (1906), giving the boy's age as about sixteen[3]. The picture is not tidy, however. The verses were already in print, unsigned, in the London periodical The Christian Pioneer by February 1862, before Featherston turned sixteen, and the handwritten copy is now presumed lost[3]. Some early twentieth-century sources instead named James H. Duffell of West Bromwich, England[1], and the most detailed study consulted here sets out both claims without settling between them[3].
Montreal from Mount Royal, photochrom, Detroit Photographic Co., ca. 1902. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.
The hymn spread through English evangelical print: William Antliff ran it in The Primitive Methodist Magazine in October 1862, and a lightly edited form appeared in Charles Russell Hurditch's The London Hymn Book of 1864[1]. Its familiar melody came from the Baptist minister Adoniram Judson Gordon (1836–1895), who met the anonymous text in a London hymnal around 1870, found the existing tunes wanting, and later recalled that “a beautiful new air sang itself to me”[4]. Hymnary.org dates the tune, now called GORDON, to its appearance in The Service of Song for Baptist Churches (1876), which Gordon compiled with S. L. Caldwell[4][2]; the Hymnology Archive, however, reports it already printed in The Vestry Hymn and Tune Book (Boston, 1872)[3], so sources differ on the first printing.
Gordon's tune and the text have stayed paired ever since[2], and Hymnary.org counts the words in more than 1,250 hymnals[1]. Hymnary.org describes the melody as an AABA form in 11.11.11.11 meter[4], and Stephen Seifert lists it among the 68 pieces in his mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam: Gospel Edition[5].
Find books with My Jesus, I Love Thee for sale →