O How I Love Jesus: A Song History

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The words of "O How I Love Jesus" are English, but its tune is American; Dr. Hawn, a professor of sacred music at Perkins School of Theology, thinks the melody probably comes from the camp-meeting era.[1] The verses, which open "There is a name I love to hear," are by Frederick Whitfield (1829–1904), who was educated at Trinity College Dublin and served as a clergyman in the Church of England.[1][2] John Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology reports that the hymn was first issued in 1855 on hymn sheets and leaflets, and Hawn adds that it was then titled "The Name of Jesus."[1][2] Chris Fenner of the Hymnology Archive finds its first hymnal appearance in A Few Hymns and Some Spiritual Songs, Selected 1856, for the Little Flock (1856), in nine stanzas, without music or attribution.[2] Sources differ on when Whitfield gathered it into his own Sacred Poems and Prose: Fenner gives a Dublin edition of 1859, while Hawn and the notes on Hymnary.org give 1861.[2][1][3] Hymnary.org notes that only four of the nine stanzas are in common use today.[3]

Early photograph of a small stone country church with a bell gable and arched windows

Unknown photographer, [Country Church], salted paper print, 1850s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for atmosphere; it has no connection to the hymn.

The refrain was not part of Whitfield's poem.[1] Hymnary.org calls it anonymous, dates its earliest known printing to the 1860s, and notes that it was attached to many other hymns in the later nineteenth century; Hawn describes such refrains traveling among several "mother hymns," a term he credits to the camp-meeting scholar Ellen Jane Lorenz.[3][1] The tune, known as O HOW I LOVE JESUS, is anonymous: Hymnary.org lists it simply as an American melody, and the modern hymnal entries consulted here describe it as a nineteenth-century American tune and name no arranger.[4][5][6] According to Fenner, it is not known in print before 1868, when two versions appeared: William H. Doane's arrangement in The Silver Spray, set to Isaac Watts's "Alas! and did my Saviour bleed," which included the refrain and set the chromatic shape that became standard, and a plainer arrangement by John Baker in Joseph Hillman's The Revivalist, set to a Charles Wesley text.[2] Hawn cites Harry Eskew as tracing the tune to the 1869 edition of The Revivalist.[1]

Hawn writes that it is unclear when the familiar tune was first matched with Whitfield's words, noting that Ira Sankey's Gospel Hymns (1896) used a different melody.[1] Fenner's earliest example of the pairing is Hymns for the Sanctuary and Social Worship, published by the United Brethren in Dayton in 1874, which took its music from The Revivalist and printed the four stanzas still usual today.[2] In Ireland the text has gone a different way: the Church of Ireland has sung it since its Church Hymnal of 1873 to William H. Havergal's tune EVAN.[2] Hymnary.org counts the text in 684 hymnals; it is No. 170 in The United Methodist Hymnal (1989) and No. 99 in the Chalice Hymnal (1995).[3][5][6]

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Sources

  1. UMC Discipleship Ministries (Dr. Hawn): "History of Hymns: 'O How I Love Jesus'".
  2. Hymnology Archive (Chris Fenner): "There is a name I love to hear".
  3. Hymnary.org: "O How I Love Jesus" (text).
  4. Hymnary.org: "O HOW I LOVE JESUS" (tune).
  5. Hymnary.org: "O How I Love Jesus" (The United Methodist Hymnal, No. 170).
  6. Hymnary.org: "O, How I Love Jesus" (Chalice Hymnal, No. 99).