Wondrous Love: A Song History
"Wondrous Love" is an American folk hymn whose words and music arrived separately. The anonymous text, a meditation on the sacrifice of Christ, first appeared in print in 1811, both in Stith Mead's collection A General Selection of the Newest and Most Admired Hymns and Spiritual Songs and in Starke Dupuy's Baptist hymnal Hymns and Spiritual Songs.[1] Some hymnals credit Alexander Means (1801–1883), but the writer is generally regarded as unknown.[1] The unusual long-and-short line pattern of the verses is borrowed from an old English ballad about the pirate Captain Kidd.[2]
Albrecht Dürer, The Adoration of the Lamb — The Hymn of the Chosen, from the Apocalypse, woodcut, about 1496–97, printed 1511. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
The tune WONDROUS LOVE was joined to the text in the 1840 edition of William Walker's shape-note tunebook The Southern Harmony, where the arrangement was credited to James Christopher (1813–1844); the melody itself is anonymous.[2] Hymnary.org's notes differ on what number to give that edition, but agree on the 1840 date.[1][2] Its appearance four years later in B. F. White's The Sacred Harp (1844) cemented the pairing, and the hymn appears on page 159 of the 1991 edition of that book, credited to Christopher with words from Mead's 1811 collection.[1][3]
The melody is modal (Dorian or Aeolian, depending on the version) and laid out in a simple ABA form; the hymnologist Erik Routley called it "incomparably beautiful."[2] Hymnary.org now counts the text in some 281 hymnals and the tune in about 167.[1][2]
Find books with Wondrous Love for sale →