Softly And Tenderly: A Song History
"Softly and Tenderly, Jesus Is Calling" is the work of Will L. Thompson (1847–1909), who wrote both its words and its music. It first appeared in 1880 in Sparkling Gems, Nos. 1 and 2, a collection compiled by the singing-school teacher J. Calvin Bushey and issued by Thompson's own publishing firm[1][2]. The tune, known in hymnals as THOMPSON, moves in triple meter beneath four stanzas and a refrain, and Hymnary.org now counts it in more than a thousand hymnals[1].
John Frederick Kensett, Twilight on the Sound, Darien, Connecticut, oil on canvas, 1872. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its evening calm; it has no connection to the hymn.
Thompson studied at Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio, at the New England Conservatory in Boston and later in Leipzig, and he wrote patriotic and secular songs as well as gospel pieces, among them "Jesus Is All the World to Me" and "There's a Great Day Coming"[2]. When commercial publishers turned his early songs away, he went into publishing himself; Will L. Thompson & Company, with offices in East Liverpool, Ohio, and Chicago, was by the 1880s also selling pianos, organs and other musical goods[2][3]. He fell ill while touring Europe and died in New York City on 20 September 1909, and he is buried in Riverview Cemetery in East Liverpool[3].
The song belongs to the revival tradition of the invitation hymn, sung at the close of a service, and the hymnal editor Carlton R. Young called it "a typical lullaby in the gospel hymn tradition"[2]. The hymnologist Ernest Emurian passed on an anecdote in which the dying evangelist Dwight L. Moody called Thompson to his bedside and told him he would rather have written this hymn than anything he himself had done; in the sources consulted here, it rests on that telling alone[2]. According to Discipleship Ministries, the hymn was sung at the memorial service for Martin Luther King Jr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on 8 April 1968, and it recurs through the 1985 film The Trip to Bountiful[2].
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