What A Friend We Have In Jesus: A Song History
The words of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” are by Joseph Medlicott Scriven (1819–1886), born in County Down, Ireland, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, who joined the Plymouth Brethren and settled in what is now Ontario in the mid-1840s, teaching in Woodstock and Brantford.[1][2][3] Accounts of the poem’s origin differ. Hymnary.org places it near Port Hope in 1855, written to console his ailing mother back in Dublin, perhaps soon after a second fiancée’s death; the Dictionary of Canadian Biography instead holds that it was first drafted in Brantford in the early 1850s, does not connect it with his mother, and dates the death of his fiancée Eliza Catherine Roach to 1860.[1][2] Scriven did move to a cottage in Port Hope around 1870, preaching in its streets and taverns, and he died in 1886 near Bewdley on Rice Lake, found in the spillway of a grist mill.[2] Asked who wrote the hymn, he is said to have replied, “The Lord and I did it between us.”[1]
Homer Dodge Martin, Sand Dunes, Lake Ontario, about 1874, black crayon. Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
The poem first appeared without a name in Horace L. Hastings’s Social Hymns, Original and Selected (1865), and Scriven was credited in a Hastings collection only in 1886, the year he died.[1][2] Its familiar melody, CONVERSE (also known as ERIE or FRIENDSHIP), was written in 1868 by Charles C. Converse (1832–1918), a Massachusetts-born lawyer who had studied music in Leipzig, and was published in 1870 in his collection Silver Wings under the pen name Karl Reden; the name ERIE honors the Pennsylvania city where he lived for many years.[4][5] Ira D. Sankey printed the text with Converse’s tune in his hymnals from 1875 onward, and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography credits the Sankey-popularized tune with much of the hymn’s fame.[1][2] Hymnary.org now indexes the text in 1,995 hymnals and the tune in 1,313.[1][4]
For mountain dulcimer players, it is among the 68 hymns and gospel songs Stephen Seifert set in DAD tuning, with melody, chords and words, in Join the Jam: Gospel Edition.[6]
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