The Lily Of The Valley: A Song History

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This is the gospel song usually titled "The Lily of the Valley"; Stephen Seifert includes it in Join the Jam: Gospel Edition under the title "Lilly In The Valley."[1] Its words are by Charles W. Fry (1837–1882), a bricklayer turned building contractor from Alderbury in Wiltshire who played several instruments and led the music at his local Wesleyan chapel.[2] When Salvation Army workers in Salisbury were being mistreated in 1878, Fry offered them protection, and he and his three sons arrived with two cornets, a trombone and a small tuba; Hymnary.org credits the family with forming the Army's first brass band, and they went on to travel with William Booth's campaigns.[2][3]

Colour chromolithograph of sprays of white lily-of-the-valley flowers and leaves in an oval mount

James F. Queen, Lilies of the Valley, chromolithograph, between 1850 and 1880. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

Fry wrote the hymn in June 1881 while staying in Lincoln, and it appeared in the Army's paper The War Cry on 29 December of that year, the year before his death.[4][2] The text borrows the lily from the Song of Solomon and the morning star from Revelation as names for Christ.[4] It was sung to a melody that Will S. Hays had written in Louisville in 1871 for the minstrel song "Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane" (the sources consulted here differ slightly over the exact wording of that title).[4][5] Words and tune were first printed together in Salvationist Music, Vol. 2 (1883); the earliest known American pairing, in Melodious Sonnets (1885), called the music simply an English melody, and Ira D. Sankey's Gospel Hymns No. 5 (1887) helped settle Fry's authorship.[4]

The hymn soon travelled well beyond the Salvation Army. It is by far the most widely printed of Fry's texts, found in some 370 hymnals across many denominations and countries, and it remains a gospel standard more than 140 years on.[2][4]

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Sources

  1. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam: Gospel Edition".
  2. Hymnary.org: "Charles W. Fry".
  3. The Salvation Army, Peer Magazine: "The Fry Family".
  4. Discipleship Ministries (United Methodist Church): "History of Hymns: The Lily of the Valley".
  5. Smithsonian National Museum of American History: "Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane".