Sabbath Home: A Song History

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"Sabbath Home," listed by Hymnary.org as "My Sabbath Home" and printed in hymnals under several variant titles, is a nineteenth-century Sunday school song with words by C. R. Blackall, written in praise of the Sabbath school as a spiritual home.[1] Hymnary.org dates the text to 1871 and traces it through 31 hymnals, the earliest being two books of that year, Pure Gold for the Sunday School and Hymns for use in Sunday Schools.[1] Pure Gold was compiled by Robert Lowry and W. H. Doane and published in New York by Biglow & Main.[2] The melody is Doane's, also dated 1871; Hymnary.org records it in 19 collections, from Christian Songs (1872) to The Children Sing (1951), among them Deseret Sunday School Songs (1909) and several German-language books.[3]

Impressionist painting of a small child in a red coat walking along a village lane under bare trees, past white houses

Julian Alden Weir, Connecticut Village (Going to School), oil on canvas, after 1891. A child walking to school in a New England village, shown for the song's Sunday-school setting; it has no connection to the hymn.

Christopher Ruby (also spelled Rubey) Blackall (1830–1924), a New York State native trained as a physician, spent about fifteen years in medicine, a span that took in Civil War army duty; he later managed a branch of the Baptist Publication Society for fourteen years, was active in Sunday school work, and edited the Advanced Bible Lesson Quarterly and Our Little Ones.[4] William Howard Doane (1832–1915, though one of John Julian's entries gives his birth year as 1831) ran a large woodworking-machinery firm in Cincinnati, superintended a Baptist Sunday school there, and edited more than forty songbooks; estimates of his output differ, from about a thousand pieces in Julian's account to more than 2,200 tunes in a later one.[5]

Simply Duets, Maureen Sellers's 123-page Fingers Of Steel book of older songs arranged for two mountain dulcimers, gives "Sabbath Home" as a melody part and a harmony part, both in DAD tuning.[6]

Our book that contains the song "Sabbath Home"

Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "My Sabbath Home (Sweet Sabbath school, more dear to me)".
  2. Hymnary.org: "Pure Gold for the Sunday School".
  3. Hymnary.org: "[Sweet Sabbath School! more dear to me]" (tune by W. H. Doane).
  4. Hymnary.org: "C. R. Blackall".
  5. Hymnary.org: "W. H. Doane".
  6. Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, Simply Duets".
  7. Image: Julian Alden Weir, Connecticut Village (Going to School), oil on canvas, after 1891. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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