O Worship The King: A Song History

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The words are by Robert Grant (died 1838), a lawyer born in Bengal who sat in the British Parliament, was knighted in 1834, served as Governor of Bombay, and died in India.[1][2] The hymn is a loose treatment of Psalm 104, dwelling on the psalm's praise of God as Creator more than following its text closely.[1][2] It shares a meter with William Kethe's sixteenth-century Genevan version of the same psalm; Hymnology Archive says Grant took his meter from Kethe's version, while the hymnologist Raymond Glover, cited by Discipleship Ministries, sees nothing more than two writers fitting the same psalm to the same meter.[3][2]

Early brown-toned photograph of a Gothic front of Westminster Abbey with its tall arched windows

Nicolaas Henneman, Westminster Abbey, salted paper print from paper negative, before May 1845. Shown because William Croft, generally credited with the tune HANOVER, was organist of the Abbey; it has no other connection to the hymn.

Sources differ on its first appearance: older accounts, followed by Discipleship Ministries, point to the Christian Observer of 1806 and to Edward Bickersteth's Christian Psalmody of 1833, but Hymnology Archive reports that the hymn printed there in 1806 was a different one and finds the text, unsigned, in a Clapham psalm collection edited by John Venn in 1824.[2][3] A text presented as more authentic than earlier printings came out after his death in Sacred Poems (1839), edited by his brother Charles Grant, Lord Glenelg.[3][1] The twentieth-century hymnologist Erik Routley later suggested that, for literary grace, it might rank among "the six finest hymns" in English.[2]

Of the two tunes most often used, HANOVER was printed without a composer's name in a 1708 supplement to the Tate and Brady New Version of the psalms and is generally credited to William Croft, organist of Westminster Abbey; it is the usual choice in England.[4][3] LYONS, long attributed to one of the Haydn brothers, is now thought more likely to be by Joseph Martin Kraus, and William Gardiner's Sacred Melodies of 1815 brought it into English hymn singing.[1][3] The hymn is number 73 in The United Methodist Hymnal.[2] The product listing for Larry Conger's Hymns Of Faith Tab Book, a Fingers Of Steel tablature book of hymns, names "O Worship The King" among its less familiar selections and places it in DAD tuning.[5]

Our book that contains the song "O Worship The King"

Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "O worship the King, all-glorious above".
  2. Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: British Hymnist Bases 'O Worship the King' on Majestic Psalm".
  3. Hymnology Archive: "O Worship the King".
  4. Hymnary.org: "HANOVER".
  5. Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, Hymns Of Faith Tab Book".
  6. Image: Nicolaas Henneman, Westminster Abbey, salted paper print from paper negative, before May 1845. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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