The Soul's Sweet Home: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

"The Soul's Sweet Home" is a hymn with words by Mrs. A. L. Davison.[1] Its tune is credited to "J. H. F.," a credit Hymnary.org links to J. H. Fillmore.[2] Hymnary.org identifies the writer as Fannie Estelle Davison, born in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, in 1851, whose family settled in Carthage, Missouri, after her father was killed when she was ten and her mother remarried.[3] She married Asa Lee Davison, a court reporter, lived with him in Chicago and in Madison, Wisconsin, and died in Chicago in March 1887.[3] James Henry Fillmore (1849–1936), a Cincinnati native, kept his father's singing school going before he and his brothers Charles and Frederick founded the Fillmore Brothers Music House, a Cincinnati firm given over to religious music.[4] Besides writing tunes, anthems and cantatas, he put out more than twenty songbooks and hymnals along with a monthly periodical.[4]

Painting of a red sun setting low under a wide golden sky above dark, snowy marshland and bare trees

George Inness, A Winter Sky, oil on canvas, 1866. A winter sunset over open country, shown as a nod to the hymn's title; the painting has no connection to the hymn.

The song is number 64 in Joy and Gladness, an 1880 collection for Sunday school and home.[2] Princeton Theological Seminary's digitized copy, 168 pages long, names James H. Fillmore as its creator and the Fillmore Brothers of Cincinnati as its publisher.[5] Of the six hymnals in which Hymnary.org indexes the text, Joy and Gladness is the earliest, and five of the six date from 1880 to 1911.[1] Later printings include Fillmore's New Christian Hymn and Tune Book of 1887, a Disciples of Christ hymnal,[6] and Hymns of Hope, a 1911 Standard Publishing Company collection meant for funerals and other occasions.[7] It survives in the 1990 57th edition of Sacred Selections for the Church, Ellis J. Crum's hymnal for Churches of Christ,[8] where it is number 363.[1]

Maureen Sellers arranges it for a pair of mountain dulcimers, one playing the melody and one the harmony, both in DAD tuning, in Simply Duets, a Fingers Of Steel book whose arrangements aim for a middle ground between easy and demanding.[9]

Our book that contains the song "The Soul's Sweet Home"

Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "The Soul's Sweet Home".
  2. Hymnary.org: "Joy and Gladness (1880), 64. The Soul's Sweet Home".
  3. Hymnary.org: "Fannie E. Davison".
  4. Hymnary.org: "J. H. Fillmore".
  5. Princeton Theological Seminary Theological Commons: "Joy and gladness for the Sunday-school and home".
  6. Hymnary.org: "New Christian Hymn and Tune Book".
  7. Hymnary.org: "Hymns of Hope".
  8. Hymnary.org: "Sacred Selections for the Church (57th ed.)".
  9. Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, Simply Duets".
  10. Image: George Inness, A Winter Sky, oil on canvas, 1866. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

← Back to Browse By Song