'Tis So Sweet To Trust In Jesus: A Song History
“’Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus” pairs a text by the English-born writer Louisa M. R. Stead (1846–1917) with the tune TRUST IN JESUS by William J. Kirkpatrick; words and music both date from 1882, the year the song was published in the collection Songs of Triumph.[1] Stead, a native of Dover in Kent, had worked as a governess before moving to America around 1871, and an earlier hymn of hers had already appeared in Winnowed Hymns (1873).[2] Kirkpatrick (1838–1921), a Pennsylvanian, gave up the furniture trade in 1878 to work full time in music, led the music at Grace Methodist Church in Philadelphia, and compiled around a hundred gospel songbooks; his melody is in 8.7.8.7 meter with a refrain.[3]
Mary Nimmo Moran, Gardiner's Bay, Long Island, seen from Fresh Pond, 1881, etching. Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
The hymn is often linked to the death of Stead’s first husband, and the details depend on the source. She married George Stead in 1873 and moved with him to Hempstead, Long Island, and a biography researched by Gordon Taylor for a Salvation Army songbook companion reports that he drowned in Hempstead Bay in May 1876 while rescuing his young son.[2] Hymnary.org’s note on the hymn instead dates the drowning to 1880 and says the song is widely believed to express the peace she found in faith after that loss.[1] Sources differ on the year, and in the sources consulted here the connection between the tragedy and the hymn rests on interpretation rather than on Stead’s own account. In January 1882 she married Robert Wodehouse at Port Elizabeth, South Africa; the couple spent roughly fifteen years as missionaries in Africa, and she died in Southern Rhodesia in 1917.[2]
The song has remained a gospel standard: Hymnary.org indexes the text in more than five hundred hymnals.[1]
Find books with 'Tis So Sweet To Trust In Jesus for sale →