The Haven Of Rest: A Song History
"The Haven of Rest" sets words by Henry Lake Gilmour to a tune by George D. Moore.[1][2] Sources differ on when the words were written: Hymnary.org's main entry for the text gives 1885, while the Cyber Hymnal dates them to 1890 and names its source as Sunlight Songs, published in Philadelphia by John J. Hood that year.[1][2] Hymnary.org dates Moore's tune to 1889, and its brief biography of him describes an itinerant evangelist in New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the late 1800s.[3][4] By 1891 the song appeared in Fair as the Morning, a Sunday-school hymnal, and Hymnary.org now counts it in several hundred hymnals.[5][1]
Jan van de Cappelle, A State Yacht and Other Craft in Calm Water, oil on wood, ca. 1660. Shown for its subject, ships at rest in still water; it has no connection to the hymn.
According to John Perry's biography of Gilmour on Hymnary.org, he was born in Londonderry, Ireland, in 1836 and came to America as a teenager with the idea of learning navigation, but stayed on in Philadelphia and worked as a painter.[6] Perry's account has him serving in the Civil War, spending several months as a prisoner in Richmond's Libby Prison, and training as a dentist once the war was over.[6] The same account says he settled in Wenonah, New Jersey, in 1869, led the choir at Pittman Grove's camp meetings for some forty years, and edited or published 25 gospel songbooks with collaborators such as John Sweney and William J. Kirkpatrick.[6] The Library of Congress gives his dates as 1836 to 1920.[7]
According to the ministry's own history, Paul Myers, a former Los Angeles radio man, launched a Christian broadcast called Haven of Rest in 1934.[8] The ministry's history also says its first quartet opened each program by singing the hymn's refrain.[9] Maureen Sellers includes the hymn in Simply Gospel, Book One, a book of easy gospel arrangements for mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[10]
Sources
- Hymnary.org: "The Haven of Rest" (text).
- Hymnary.org: "The Haven of Rest" (The Cyber Hymnal #2180).
- Hymnary.org: "My soul in sad exile was out on life's sea" (tune by George D. Moore).
- Hymnary.org: "George D. Moore".
- Hymnary.org: "Fair as the Morning (1891), The Haven of Rest".
- Hymnary.org: "H. L. Gilmour".
- Library of Congress Name Authority File: "Gilmour, H. L. (Henry Lake), 1836-1920".
- Haven Today: "About".
- Haven Today: "A Legacy of Revival".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, Simply Gospel, Book One".
- Image: Jan van de Cappelle, A State Yacht and Other Craft in Calm Water, oil on wood, ca. 1660. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.