Stand Up, Stand Up For Jesus: A Song History
"Stand Up, Stand Up For Jesus" grew out of the Philadelphia revival of 1858, when the Episcopal preacher Dudley Tyng was drawing thousands to midday services at the YMCA.[1] His outspoken opposition to slavery had already cost him a congregation, and that spring an accident with farm machinery mangled his arm; he died within days.[1][2] Accounts of his last words vary, but the versions in the sources consulted here all center on a charge to stand up for Jesus.[1][2]
Frederick DeBourg Richards, First Bank of the United States, Philadelphia, salted paper print from wet collodion negative, 1859. A Philadelphia street in 1859, a year after the revival from which the hymn came; the photograph has no connection to the hymn.
George Duffield Jr., a Presbyterian colleague then pastoring in Philadelphia, preached on Ephesians 6:14 at a memorial service on April 25, 1858, and closed by reading new verses built on Tyng's words.[2][3] His Sunday school superintendent had the poem printed on a small handbill for the children, and a Baptist editor who obtained a copy promoted it in his periodical.[1][3] It ran to six eight-line stanzas, though hymnals commonly print a shortened form.[2][3] Sources differ on its early printing history: one places it in The Psalmist in 1858, while another says that after the leaflet it was first published in The Church Psalmist of 1859.[2][3]
The familiar tune, WEBB, was written by the English-born organist George J. Webb on his voyage to America, where he settled in 1830, taught at Lowell Mason's Boston Academy of Music and served as president of the Handel and Haydn Society.[2][4] It was published in The Odeon (1837), a secular collection Webb compiled with Mason, and by 1842 was carrying the hymn "The Morning Light Is Breaking"; it is also known as MORNING LIGHT.[4] William B. Bradbury later matched the melody to Duffield's text, a pairing found in many of Ira D. Sankey's hymnals, though some hymnals use other tunes such as GEIBEL.[2][4][5] Bing Futch sets it in DAA tuning in Mountain Dulcimer In The Band (Book 5 - Gospel), a J.O.B. Entertainment book of church hymns and other songs of faith that comes with band recordings to play along with.[6]
Sources
- Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus".
- Hymnary.org: "Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus" (Psalter Hymnal, 1987, with handbook notes).
- Hymnary.org: "George Duffield" (with Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology).
- Hymnary.org: "WEBB".
- Hymnary.org: "Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus".
- Bing Futch: "Mountain Dulcimer In The Band (Book 5 - Gospel)".
- Image: Frederick DeBourg Richards, First Bank of the United States, Philadelphia, salted paper print from wet collodion negative, 1859. The Cleveland Museum of Art.