McDowell Memo: 2 Great Hymn Writers that changed America
The Wonderful Unique lives of 2 Great Hymn Writers
Biographies Philip Paul Bliss, 1838-1876
Born in
Pennsylvania in 1838, composer and singer Philip Paul Bliss worked as a farmer
and woodcutter until 1855. After attending a singing school and later the
Normal Academy of Music in Geneseo, N.Y., he began teaching music and composing
songs in the mid 1860s. It was during this period that Bliss met composer and
music educator George F. Root, who encouraged Bliss to continue his efforts at
music composition. In 1865 Bliss began working for the music publishing house
of Root & Cady of Chicago, which hired him to conduct musical conventions
throughout the northwestern United States.
Bliss
enjoyed a reputation as an able basso profundo soloist and chorister. With
evangelists D.L. Moody and Daniel Whittle, Bliss toured the country for a time
singing and even preaching. By the 1870s Bliss began to devote a great deal of
energy to the composition of sacred music. Some of his earliest songs were set
to music by his friend George F. Root, but he soon was composing words and
music, and he had four collections of songs published. Philip Bliss and his
wife, Lucy J. Young, died tragically in a railway disaster near Ashtabula,
Ohio, on December 29, 1876.
Selected Works at the Library of Congress
Bliss was living in Rome Pa at the time of his
death and there is a museum to his life in the house they lived in.
Fanny Crosby, byname of Frances Jane Crosby, married name Fanny Van Alstyne, (born
March 24, 1820, Southeast, N.Y., U.S.—died Feb. 12, 1915, Bridgeport, Conn.), American writer of hymns, the
best known of which was “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.”
Crosby lost
her sight to an eye infection and medical ignorance at the age of six weeks.
She nonetheless grew up an active and happy child. From 1835 to 1843 she
attended the New York Institution for the Blind in New
York City.
Her inclination to versify was encouraged by a visiting Scottish phrenologist,
who examined her and proclaimed her a poet. Thereafter she was the school’s
chief ornament. She contributed a poetic eulogy on President William Henry Harrison to the New York Herald in 1841 and subsequently published verses in other
newspapers. In 1844 she published her first volume, The Blind Girl and Other Poems, and in 1851 her second, Monterey and Other Poems. From 1851 she began writing verses to
be set to music. With George F. Root, music instructor at the school,
Crosby wrote a successful cantata, The Flower Queen. She also wrote lyrics for scores of
songs, some of which, such as “Hazel Dell,” “There’s Music in the Air,” and
“Rosalie, the Prairie Flower,” were widely popular. After her graduation,
Crosby remained at the New York Institution for the Blind as a teacher of
English grammar and rhetoric and of ancient history until 1858. That year she married
Alexander Van Alstyne, also blind, a former pupil, and then a teacher at the
school, and she published her third volume, A Wreath of Columbia’s Flowers. About 1864 Crosby began writing
hymns. Like her poetry, her hymns suffer generally from
cliché and sentimentality, but they also display an occasional gleam of more
than ordinary talent. In all Crosby wrote between 5,500 and 9,000 hymns, the
exact count obscured by the numerous pseudonyms (as many as 200, according to
some sources) she employed to preserve her modesty. The best known of her hymns
include “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” “Rescue the Perishing,” “Blessed
Assurance,” “The Bright Forever,” “Savior, More Than Life to Me,” and “Pass Me
Not, O Gentle Savior.” They were especially popular in the Methodist Church,
which for a time observed an annual “Fanny Crosby Day.” Most prominent among
her many musical collaborators was Ira D. Sankey. In 1897 she published a final
volume of poetry, Bells at Evening and Other
Verses, and she
later wrote two volumes of autobiography, Fanny Crosby’s Life-Story (1903) and Memories of Eighty Years (1906).
Phillip Paul Bliss
Fanny Crosby
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