Trust And Obey: A Song History
"Trust and Obey" grew out of a testimony meeting during the evangelist Dwight L. Moody's revival services in Brockton, Massachusetts. As Daniel B. Towner later told the story, recorded in Ira D. Sankey's The Story of the Gospel Hymns (1906), a young man rose to admit he was still unsure of himself but had resolved to trust and to obey. Towner wrote down the remark and mailed it, with an account of the evening, to the Presbyterian minister John H. Sammis, who turned it into the verses and refrain; Towner then supplied the music.[1]
Albert Fitch Bellows, Sunday in New England, about 1876, watercolor. Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
Both words and tune are dated 1887, the year the hymn appeared in Hymns Old and New.[1][2] Sammis, a Brooklyn native who came to faith in Indiana and worked for the YMCA before entering the ministry, wrote more than a hundred hymns, but this is by far his most reprinted.[3] Towner, who later led the music department at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago from 1893 until his death, was credited with some two thousand tunes, and this verse-and-refrain gospel melody is counted among his sturdiest and most popular.[2] Carried along by the Moody and Sankey revivals and the Sankey hymnals, it has since been printed in hundreds of hymnals.[1][2]
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