My Shepherd Will Supply My Need: A Song History

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"My Shepherd Will Supply My Need" is Isaac Watts's metrical version of Psalm 23. He published it in 1719 in The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, a book of psalm paraphrases printed without music, where it was one of three renderings of that psalm.[1][2] Watts wrote six stanzas, which modern hymnals usually join in pairs to make three, and the wording has changed very little since.[2][3] Hymnary.org lists the text in 254 hymnals.[3]

Sketch of a shepherd seated on the ground with his dog and resting sheep

Jean-François Millet, A Seated Shepherd with His Dog and Sheep, conté crayon on wove paper. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for the psalm’s pastoral image.

The tune that usually goes with the text is RESIGNATION, an anonymous melody from the Southern shape-note tradition.[1][3][4] Sources give its earliest printing differently. A note on Hymnary.org's text page names Walker's Southern Harmony of 1835, while the site's tune page lists Freeman Lewis's The Beauties of Harmony (1828) ahead of it; the Hymnology Archive says the melody first appeared in the fifth edition of Lewis's book under the name HOPEWELL and became RESIGNATION in Joseph Funk's Genuine Church Music (1832).[2][3][4] Accounts of the pairing differ as well: the Psalter Hymnal Handbook describes Walker's 1835 Southern Harmony as printing the tune with Watts's words, whereas the Hymnology Archive says the two were first joined in J. W. Steffy's The Valley Harmonist (Winchester, Virginia, 1836) and spread more widely through the revised Southern Harmony of 1854, where Hymnary.org shows the hymn as No. 38.[1][2][5] In 1937 the composer Virgil Thomson set the hymn for chorus as the first of his Hymns of the Old South.[6][7]

Other tunes have carried the text too.[3] One is MONORA, which Hymnary.org credits to William B. Bradbury and dates to 1863; Hymnary.org lists it in 13 hymnals, against 121 for RESIGNATION (counts that include other texts sung to each tune), and the Cyber Hymnal pairs it with Watts's words.[4][8][9] In the sources consulted here, Bradbury's name is linked to this hymn only through MONORA; none of them attributes RESIGNATION to him.

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need" (Psalter Hymnal 550).
  2. Hymnology Archive: "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need".
  3. Hymnary.org: "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need" (text).
  4. Hymnary.org: "RESIGNATION (Southern Harmony)" (tune).
  5. Hymnary.org: "My Shepherd will supply my need" (The Southern Harmony, No. 38).
  6. Virgil Thomson (Aaron Copland Fund for Music): "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need".
  7. AllMusic: "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need, hymn arrangement for chorus (Hymns of the Old South, No. 1)".
  8. Hymnary.org: "MONORA" (tune).
  9. Hymnary.org: "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need" (Cyber Hymnal 4356).