Standing On The Promises: A Song History

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Both the words and the tune of “Standing on the Promises” come from Russell Kelso Carter, a Baltimore native born in 1849.[1][2] After graduating from the Pennsylvania Military Academy in 1867, he stayed on there to teach chemistry, mathematics and civil engineering.[3] He wrote the hymn in 1886, while still on the academy's faculty, and it was printed that same year in Songs of Perfect Love, a Philadelphia collection he compiled with John Sweney.[1][4] The Traditional Ballad Index notes that Charles Johnson's One Hundred and One Famous Hymns dates its composition a year earlier, to 1885, so sources differ on the exact date.[5] Carter's career ranged well beyond the classroom: he was ordained a Methodist minister in 1887, later practiced medicine, and turned out textbooks and novels alongside his hymns.[1] Of his hymns, the Ballad Index suggests this is apparently the only one that caught on.[5]

Engraving of people cooking over steaming kettles and setting tables under a tent canopy among trees at a camp meeting

Winslow Homer, Camp Meeting Sketches: Cooking, wood engraving, 1858. An American camp meeting of the 1850s; the engraving has no connection to the hymn.

Phil Kerr, writing on music in evangelism, linked the song's marching, martial feel to Carter's years at a military school.[1] Hymnologist Kenneth Osbeck noted that it was “widely used in the great evangelistic crusades.”[1] Methodist acceptance came slowly, though; it was left out of authorized Methodist hymnals until the current United Methodist Hymnal, where it appears as No. 374.[1] Hymnary.org now counts it in close to 590 hymnals, and its translations include Spanish and Swahili versions.[4] In 2025 it was added to Hymns for Home and Church, the new worldwide hymnbook of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.[3] The Ballad Index adds that its chorus harmonies are easy to pick up and that it seems to be a favorite with amateur gospel groups.[5] Blue Murder included it on their 2002 album No One Stands Alone.[6]

Shelley Stevens sets it in the key of G in Using The 1 1/2 Fret In DAD Tuning, a Fingers Of Steel book of chords, scales and tunes that helps DAD-tuned dulcimer players get full use from the extra 1½ fret, with downloadable recordings of most of its pieces.[7]

Our book that contains the song "Standing On The Promises"

Sources

  1. Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: Stirring 'Promises' serves as popular crusade hymn".
  2. Hymnary.org: "Christian Hymns (1935), #33: Standing on the Promises".
  3. Church News: "'Standing on the Promises,' now in the Church's new hymnbook, points singers to God's promises".
  4. Hymnary.org: "Standing on the Promises".
  5. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Standing on the Promises".
  6. Mainly Norfolk: "Standing on the Promises of God".
  7. Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Using The 1 1/2 Fret In DAD Tuning".
  8. Image: Winslow Homer, Camp Meeting Sketches: Cooking, wood engraving, 1858. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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