Nearer, My God, To Thee: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

Sarah Flower Adams (1805–1848), an English poet and the daughter of the radical journalist Benjamin Flower, wrote this text around 1840, and it first appeared in print in 1841 in Hymns and Anthems, a London collection compiled by William Fox.[1][2] She had lived for a time with the Fox family, and her sister Eliza Flower, a composer, was a close friend of Robert Browning.[3] The middle stanzas retell Jacob’s dream at Bethel from Genesis 28, in which a ladder joins earth and heaven, while the opening stanza invokes the cross and the closing one looks toward eternal life.[1][2]

Landscape with Jacob asleep on the ground while angels move on a shaft of light rising toward heaven

Joseph Goupy after Salvator Rosa, Jacob's Dream, c. 1720, gouache. Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

In America the words are usually sung to BETHANY by Lowell Mason (1792–1872), often credited as a founder of American church music; Hymnary.org’s tune entry dates it to 1856, though other accounts give 1859.[4][1][2] Hymnary.org lists the tune in more than 1,400 hymnals and the text in over 2,800, while English composers gave it other settings, among them John B. Dykes’s HORBURY (1861) and Arthur Sullivan’s PROPIOR DEO (1872).[4][1] The hymn is reported to have been a favorite of Queen Victoria, Edward VII, and Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt; it was part of James Garfield’s burial in 1881, McKinley is said to have quoted it near his death in 1901, and it has long been heard at American presidential funerals.[1][2][3]

The best-known story attached to the hymn is that the band of the RMS Titanic played it as the ship went down in 1912, but that account is disputed. No member of the band survived, and passenger and crew recollections conflict: some recalled the hymn, while wireless operator Harold Bride remembered the band playing a piece he called “Autumn.”[5] Because the hymn has more than one melody, even those who named it may have heard different tunes, and hymnal editor Carlton Young has pointed out that Mason’s American tune would have been an unlikely choice for English players.[5][1][2] The hymn is included in Stephen Seifert’s mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam: Gospel Edition.[6]

Find books with Nearer, My God, To Thee for sale →

Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "Nearer, My God, to Thee".
  2. Discipleship Ministries (C. Michael Hawn): "History of Hymns: Famed hymn expresses writer’s longing for heaven".
  3. Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University: "Giving Nineteenth Century Women Writers a Voice and a Face — Sarah Flower Adams (1805–1848)".
  4. Hymnary.org: "BETHANY (Mason)".
  5. Snopes: "Last Song on the Titanic".
  6. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam Gospel Edition".