Shall We Gather At The River: A Song History
Robert Lowry, a Baptist minister then serving a congregation in Brooklyn, New York, wrote both the words and the music of "Shall We Gather at the River?" in the summer of 1864.[1] The text grew out of his reflection on the river of life pictured in Revelation 22; by Lowry's own later account, he had begun to wonder why hymn writers dwelt so often on the river of death and so seldom on that clear, life-giving water.[1] An early twentieth-century biographical sketch places the composition on a sweltering day when an epidemic was causing widespread grief in the city, and says the words and melody came to him together while he sat at a parlor organ.[2] The hymn first appeared in print, under the title "Beautiful River," in the 1865 collection Happy Voices.[1][3]
Sanford Robinson Gifford, Haverstraw Bay, 1868. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
Lowry, who pastored in Brooklyn from 1861 to 1869, went on to edit a long run of Sunday-school songbooks for the publishers Biglow & Main, and he is also remembered as the composer of "I Need Thee Every Hour" and "Low in the Grave He Lay."[2] His tune for this hymn is known in hymnals as HANSON PLACE, after the Brooklyn church he led, and sometimes as BEAUTIFUL RIVER; it is in the public domain and set in 8.7.8.7 meter with a refrain.[1][3] The same sketch reports that the song was sung by more than forty thousand voices on Children's Day in Brooklyn in 1865, yet Lowry himself was modest about its merits, describing it as "brass band music" with a marching feel.[2] Its staying power is plain from Hymnary.org's index, which lists the text in more than eight hundred hymnals; many modern books leave out one of the original five stanzas.[1]
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