My Mother's Bible: A Song History

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The "My Mother's Bible" credited to George P. Morris and Henry Russell is a sentimental parlor ballad of 1841. Morris (1802–1864), a Philadelphia-born writer, edited the New York Mirror and won wide recognition as a song lyricist[1]; Russell (1812–1900), a London-born singer and composer, spent about a decade touring the United States from the mid-1830s and wrote some three hundred songs[2]. Their ballad was issued in New York by Firth & Hall in 1841 as a strophic song for voice and piano, with a dedication from Morris to the Hon. John Cotton Smith of Sharon, Connecticut[3][4], and it also survives in an edition from William Hall & Son[5]. Morris reprinted the poem in his 1843 collection The Deserted Bride, and Other Poems; its speaker treasures a family Bible as a link to a mother and to the generations who handled it before[6].

Color print of a mother seated beneath a tree reading the Bible to her children beside a lake

Joseph Hoover, publisher, mother and children reading the Bible, chromolithograph, 1877. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The words outlived the drawing room. Hymnary.org, the hymnal database, records Morris's text in more than eighty hymnals, sung to Russell's melody and to settings by other composers[6].

A separate gospel song shares the title but not the words or the tune. It dates from 1893, with words by Milan Bertrand Williams, an evangelist, and music by the Alabama-born gospel songwriter Charles D. Tillman (1861–1943); its text, which has a refrain and looks back on a mother's Bible teaching in childhood, appears in well over a hundred hymnals[7][8][9][10]. The baritone Edward Allen recorded the Tillman song with a male chorus for Edison in 1917[11]. A third song of the same name, on a similar theme but with words that match neither of the other two, was sung by Ed Stilley at Eureka Springs, Arkansas, in 1958 for the Max Hunter folk song collection[12].

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "George Pope Morris".
  2. Baldwin Wallace University Library: "Biographical Overview - Henry Russell".
  3. Johns Hopkins University, Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection: "My Mother's Bible. A Ballad." (Box 123, Item 081).
  4. IMSLP: "My Mother's Bible (Russell, Henry)".
  5. Johns Hopkins University, Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection: "My Mother's Bible. A Ballad." (Box 101, Item 087).
  6. Hymnary.org: "My Mother's Bible" (text by George P. Morris).
  7. Hymnary.org: "My Mother's Bible" (text by M. B. Williams).
  8. Hymnary.org: "M. B. Williams".
  9. Hymnary.org: "There's a dear and precious Book" (tune by Charlie D. Tillman).
  10. Hymnary.org: "Charlie D. Tillman".
  11. Internet Archive, Great 78 Project: "My Mother's Bible" by Edward Allen (Edison 80394).
  12. Missouri State University, Max Hunter Folk Song Collection: "My Mother's Bible".