Sweet Hour Of Prayer: A Song History
“Sweet Hour of Prayer” is usually credited to William W. Walford, but the story behind that name is thinner than hymnal credits suggest. The text reached most readers through the New York Observer of September 13, 1845, in an unsigned piece that described Walford as a blind preacher in Coleshill, Warwickshire, who composed verses in his head and kept them by memory.[1][2] The contributor, later identified by the hymnologist William J. Reynolds as Thomas Salmon, had been a Congregational pastor at Coleshill before moving to America in 1842, and said he had taken the poem down in pencil while Walford spoke it aloud.[2][3] Curiously, the same four stanzas, with small changes in wording and noticeably different closing lines, had already been printed in London earlier that year in John Stamp’s The Christian’s Spiritual Song Book, without an author’s name.[2]
Follower of Rembrandt, An Elderly Man in Prayer, 1660s or later. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
Who Walford was remains an open question. A search of Warwickshire poll books and directories turned up no Walford at all, and although the 1841 census lists several men named William Walford in the county, none is clearly the blind preacher.[2] Reynolds floated a link to the Rev. William Walford (1772–1850), an educated Congregational minister at Homerton who wrote a book on prayer, suggesting Salmon may have dressed up his account; Hymnary.org likewise notes that some credit the hymn to this Homerton Walford, who was not blind.[1][3] Others find that connection weak, since the minister’s own autobiography never describes him as blind or as a writer of verse.[2] The question is best left unsettled: the name Walford rests on Salmon’s report, and the sources consulted here regard the true author as still unidentified.[2]
The melody that made the hymn a fixture is credited to the composer William B. Bradbury (1816–1868).[4] He printed the setting in Bradbury’s Anthem Book of 1860, where a credit marking suggests he had borrowed or adapted it, and again, now taking full credit, in the Sunday-school collection The Golden Chain of 1861, without naming the text’s author either time; some accounts give 1861 as the tune’s date and treat The Golden Chain as its first pairing with the words.[1][2][3] The tune, which shares the hymn’s title, has remained essentially the only one sung to these words.[1] Hymnary.org now counts the text in more than 1,500 hymnals and the Bradbury tune in more than 800, a measure of how deeply it settled into Protestant congregational singing.[1][4]
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