On Jordan's Stormy Banks: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

Samuel Stennett (1727–1795) was an English Baptist minister attached to the Baptist congregation in Little Wild Street, London, first as his father's assistant and then, from 1758 until his death, as its pastor.[1] His hymn picturing the believer on the bank of the Jordan, looking across to the promised land, was first printed in John Rippon's A Selection of Hymns from the Best Authors (London, 1787), where it ran to eight four-line stanzas under the heading "Heaven Anticipated."[2][3]

Engraving of a crowd in long robes watching a baptism in a river, with a town and hills beyond

Lucas van Leyden, The Baptism of Christ in the River Jordan, engraving; first state, ca. 1510. It shows the River Jordan of the hymn's imagery, but has no connection to the hymn itself.

The hymn took a different shape in America, where versions commonly dropped three of Stennett's stanzas and gained a camp-meeting refrain, the source of the tune's name.[3] The tune PROMISED LAND was printed as No. 51 in William Walker's The Southern Harmony (1835), credited to "Miss M. Durham," and was originally in a minor key.[3][2] Hymnary.org's tune page names her Matilda T. Durham, but its notes on the hymn say she has not yet been identified, and the hymnologist C. Michael Hawn wrote in 2013 that nothing else is known of the composer.[4][3][2] Rigdon M. McIntosh, a Tennessee-born singing-school teacher and longtime music editor for the publishing house of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, later recast the tune in a major key.[5][3] Sources differ on the date: Hymnary.org places his version in A Collection of Hymns and Tunes (1874), while Hawn dates it to H. R. Christie's Gospel Light (1895).[3][2]

McIntosh's major-key version became the standard form in many later hymnals, and the hymn appears as No. 724 in The United Methodist Hymnal.[2][3] Hymnary.org lists the text in more than 1,600 hymnals and the tune in more than 450.[3][4] Maureen Sellers includes it, as "The Promised Land," in Simply Gospel, Book Three, a collection of spirituals, hymns and old-time gospel songs for dulcimer in DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[6]

Our book that contains the song "On Jordan's Stormy Banks"

Sources

  1. Hymnology Archive: "Samuel Stennett".
  2. Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: 'On Jordan's Stormy Banks I Stand'".
  3. Hymnary.org: "On Jordan's stormy banks I stand".
  4. Hymnary.org: "PROMISED LAND (American)".
  5. Hymnary.org: "R. M. McIntosh".
  6. Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, Simply Gospel, Book Three".
  7. Image: Lucas van Leyden, The Baptism of Christ in the River Jordan, engraving; first state, ca. 1510. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

← Back to Browse By Song