Tell Me The Story Of Jesus: A Song History
"Tell Me the Story of Jesus" joins words by Fanny Crosby (1820–1915) to music by John R. Sweney (1837–1899), two of the leading gospel songwriters of their generation.[1] By Crosby's own account, the two became friends at the summer revival meetings held on the Methodist campground in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, where Sweney became song leader in 1878 and stayed in that post for twenty years.[1] Each wanted songs that could serve in Christian teaching, and for over ten years Sweney led the music of the Sunday school at Philadelphia's Bethany Presbyterian Church, then among the biggest in the country.[1] The hymn was first printed in The Quiver of Sacred Song (Philadelphia: John J. Hood, 1880), a book Hymnary.org credits to William Kirkpatrick and Sweney.[1][2] That first edition used a visual sol-fa notation of Hood's own devising, meant as an alternative to shape notes, which did not last.[1]
Winslow Homer, Camp Meeting Sketches: Landing at the Cape, wood engraving, 1858. Visitors arriving at a seaside Methodist camp meeting on Cape Cod in 1858, a gathering like the Ocean Grove meetings where Crosby and Sweney became friends; the engraving does not show Ocean Grove and has no connection to the hymn.
Crosby's verses move through the life of Jesus in sequence, from his birth and temptation through his ministry to the crucifixion, burial and resurrection, an orderly plan that Hymnology Archive sees as well suited to teaching.[1] Hymnary.org gives the meter as 8.7.8.7 double with a refrain and names Sweney's tune STORY OF JESUS, dated 1880.[2][3] Sweney, a native of West Chester, Pennsylvania, led the band of the Third Delaware Regiment in the Civil War, afterwards became professor of music at the Pennsylvania Military Academy, and began composing church music in 1871.[3]
In his 1931 hymnal handbook, the singing evangelist Homer Rodeheaver recalled leading the song for soldiers in France during the First World War, in shell-damaged barracks, candlelit dugouts and at rest halts on the way to the front, and wrote that nothing else he sang affected them in the same way.[1] Hymnary.org now traces the text through 305 hymnals and records translations into Dutch, Spanish and Swahili.[2] For mountain dulcimer, Larry Conger arranges it in DAD tuning in Christmas Duets For Mountain Dulcimer, a Fingers Of Steel download that pairs the PDF book with individual song files and an MP3 of every piece.[4]
Sources
- Hymnology Archive: "Tell Me the Story of Jesus".
- Hymnary.org: "Tell Me the Story of Jesus".
- Hymnary.org: "STORY OF JESUS (Sweney)".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, Christmas Duets For Mountain Dulcimer".
- Image: Winslow Homer, Camp Meeting Sketches: Landing at the Cape, wood engraving, 1858. The Cleveland Museum of Art.