To God Be The Glory: A Song History

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"To God Be The Glory" joins words by Fanny Crosby, the blind hymn writer who studied and later taught at the New York City School for the Blind, to a tune by William Howard Doane, and the tune is known by the hymn's own name, TO GOD BE THE GLORY.[1][2] Doane was one of Crosby's long-time collaborators, the two having first met in New York in 1867, but the sources consulted here do not record how this particular song came to be written.[2] Its first printing is disputed: the Hymnology Archive names Brightest and Best, a Doane and Robert Lowry collection issued by Biglow & Main in 1875, while Hymnary.org's notes and Discipleship Ministries trace it to Doane's Songs of Devotion of 1870.[1][2][3]

Ink and wash drawing of a ring of angels and cherubs among clouds

Luca Giordano, A Glory of Angels, pen and brown ink with brown wash over black chalk, ca. 1650–69. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the hymn.

The hymn was largely overlooked in America at first, and it did not appear in Ira Sankey's American Gospel Hymns series.[1][2] It fared better in Britain, where it was printed in Sankey's Sacred Songs and Solos (sources differ on when it entered that series) and where it later appeared in collections such as the Methodist Hymn Book of 1933.[1][2][3] Cliff Barrows, song leader for Billy Graham, heard it sung in Britain in 1952, and it was put into the songbook for Graham's 1954 London crusade at Harringay Arena, where Graham asked for it to be repeated often and where, in the closing weeks, it became the team's theme hymn.[2] The team brought it back for the Nashville crusade in August 1954, and the hymnologist William J. Reynolds remarked in 1964 on this "long-forgotten American gospel song" having been imported from England.[2][3]

The hymn became widely popular in the United States, Britain and Australia, and Hymnary.org now counts it in nearly three hundred hymnals.[1] Judy House arranges it in four parts in Classic Hymns In Multiple Parts, a collection of ensemble arrangements of twenty classic hymns for dulcimer groups, with the dulcimer parts in DAD tuning.[4]

Our book that contains the song "To God Be The Glory"

Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "To God Be the Glory".
  2. Hymnology Archive: "To God be the glory".
  3. Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: 'To God Be the Glory'".
  4. Judy House: "Classic Hymns In Multiple Parts".
  5. Image: Luca Giordano, A Glory of Angels, pen and brown ink with brown wash over black chalk, ca. 1650–69. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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