10. Writing Hymns
10
WRITING HYMNS
Fanny joined Mary Ann Kidder and Josephine Pollard in a “trio” to produce the bulk of the poems Bradbury and his colleagues set to music for Sunday school hymn books. The first Bradbury hymnal to which Fanny contributed was The Golden Censer (1864). “We Are Going,” which was given the title “Our Bright Home Above,” and “There’s a Cry from Macedonia” were credited to Fanny. She may have contributed other hymns, but Bradbury, following the practice of Root and other publishers, did not always designate the authors.
Other hymnals followed.
Most of her hymns would appear under the name of “Miss Fanny J. Crosby.” When they married, Van realized his middle-aged bride had a career and reputation of her own, and he felt that to have her change her name was subordinating her career to his. So he encouraged her to maintain her own career and name. Fanny variously called herself “Miss Crosby,” “Mrs. Crosby,” and “Madam Crosby.” Whenever she had to write her married name, for legal reasons, she used “Van Alstyne.”
FANNY VARIOUSLY CALLED HERSELF “MISS CROSBY,” “MRS. CROSBY,” AND “MADAM CROSBY.”
The Civil War was over, but Fanny’s work as a hymn writer was just beginning. Bradbury was preparing another hymnal, and Fanny was asked to supply hymns. Usually, the music came first. Bradbury would give Fanny a tune for which she was to provide the words; often, he would give her the title and subject, too. This was not always the case, however, and frequently she was allowed to choose the topic, often providing the poem before Bradbury or one of his colleagues wrote the music.
Sometimes Fanny’s poems were inspired by trivial bits of conversation—as, for instance, the afternoon she, Bradbury, Vet Main, and an eminent musician named Philip Phillips were “discussing various things” and Phillips looked at his watch and realized he had to go. “Good night,” he said, “until we meet in the morning.”
When he had left, Fanny turned to Bradbury and remarked, “If I write a hymn for that subject, will you compose the music?” The composer agreed, and Fanny wrote a funeral hymn:
Goodnight! Goodnight!
’Till we meet in the morning,
Far above this fleeting shore;
To endless joy in a moment awaking,
There we’ll sleep no more.
Robert Lowry, author of “Shall We Gather at the River?”, set the poem to music.
Bradbury was a sick man when he and Fanny first met, and he told her from the start he knew he had but a short time to live. In April 1866 he was so ill he had to go South in hopes of regaining his health. He remained there all summer.
Meanwhile, Fanny was not idle. She reported regularly to the office to prepare poems and receive melodies for the new volume. Her talents had come to the attention of other writers and publishers of church music. One of them was Phoebe Palmer Knapp, who became one of Fanny’s most devoted friends. Born about 1835, Phoebe was married to Joseph Fairchild Knapp, who later founded the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Her understanding of Christianity was to aid the poor and foster social reform.
Phoebe was attractive, tall and slim, with fine, regular features, intense eyes, and dark, curling hair. Although deeply concerned about the plight of the poor, she by no means disdained the life of the rich. She was a lavish dresser, given to wearing elaborate gowns and diamond tiaras. The “Knapp Mansion,” a palatial residence in Brooklyn, was a New York institution where she held a Europeanstyle salon, entertaining most of the prominent people of the day. Almost every Republican president, Union general, and Methodist bishop was entertained there.
Her evening musicales were the talk of the town. In her music room was one of the finest collections of musical instruments in the country, and many well-known artists and performers were her guests.
Very talkative, Phoebe had the reputation of a smothering, possessive, strong-willed woman and a bizarre eccentric. She considered herself a better musician than she actually was.
Nevertheless, Fanny came to love Phoebe and was a frequent guest at the Knapp Mansion, where she enjoyed free access to the music room. At the mansion, she was introduced to such dignitaries as Presidents Grant, Hayes, Garfield, McKinley, and Teddy Roosevelt. Here, she frequently conversed with her friend Henry Ward Beecher and his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. She came to know the bloody general, William Tecumseh Sherman, the temperance crusader, Frances Willard, and the poet, Alice Cary.
SHE WAS INTRODUCED TO SUCH DIGNITARIES AS PRESIDENTS GRANT, HAYES, GARFIELD, MCKINLEY, AND TEDDY ROOSEVELT.
Phoebe would have done more for Fanny, who was living in poverty, but the poet refused her beneficence. She provided Phoebe with many poems, which Phoebe set to music and published through a brother who owned a publishing company.
Another musician who became seriously interested in Fanny’s talents was Philip Phillips. He was fourteen years younger than Fanny but had gained nationwide renown through his song services. His beautiful baritone renditions of hymns had considerable influence on listeners.
Phillips occasionally called upon Fanny to provide him with a hymn or two for his evangelistic services. In 1866, he was busy preparing a hymnal to be titled The Singing Pilgrim, or Pilgrim’s Progress, Illustrated in Song for the Sabbath School and Family. It was centered around John Bunyan’s seventeenth-century classic. He asked Fanny to write hymns based on the thought contained in various selections of the book; he himself would provide the tunes.
He gave her a selection of seventy-five quotations of a few lines each. Fanny memorized them and selected forty she thought appropriate for hymns. Then she composed forty poems in her head. When the last one had been completed, she dictated them one after the other to her secretary at Bradbury’s office.
Phillips and everyone else was amazed at Fanny’s phenomenal memory, but she made light of it, saying every person without sight has to develop the memory—and others could do it, too, if they were unable to refer to the written word.
Her forty hymns comprised the bulk of The Singing Pilgrim, which became very popular and was circulated widely. But few people knew who wrote the popular lyrics, for Phillips, like Root, paid Fanny a dollar or two for her efforts and then published the hymns under his own name.
In addition to visiting Phoebe Knapp, Fanny spent a great deal of time with her neighbors in the tenements where she and Van boarded in Manhattan. She staged her own soirées in the dingy houses, gathering residents for an evening of song, accompanied by guitar.
She and her husband seem to have gone their separate ways. Van had his circle of friends and activities, Fanny had hers, and they seemed content that way. Each retained a lively interest in the other’s career without really becoming a part of it.
Bradbury returned from the South in the fall of 1866, apparently improved in health. The following year, Fresh Laurels was published. In addition to the title hymn, it contained eleven hymns attributed to Fanny Crosby or one of her pen names. Of varying quality, they showed simplicity, directness, emotional power, and a relationship to daily life—earmarks of her art.
In 1867, Fanny and Van were living on Varick Street on the Lower West Side, in half of a third-floor garret. This tenement, where thirty-three people were crowded into an unbelievably small space, was far from the worst of New York’s slums. All the neighbors seem to have been respectable, working-class people. There were dressmakers, gold beaters, hackmen, carriage painters, truckmen, and grocery clerks. Ethnically, there were many Irish, Germans, and blacks; Fanny and Van were among the minority of white Anglo-Saxons.
There was no outside ventilation or running water in the rooms. Fanny and Van could have lived in better circumstances, but Fanny insisted on giving away all she received that was not required for their basic needs. She wanted to live with the poor as one of them, for she believed part of her mission in life was to them. These people saw the good things in life passing them by, going to others. It was for them she wrote hymns like the following:
FANNY INSISTED ON GIVING AWAY ALL SHE RECEIVED THAT WAS NOT REQUIRED FOR BASIC NEEDS.
Pass me not, O gentle Saviour,
Hear my humble cry;
While on others Thou art smiling,
Do not pass me by.
She wrote for the wretched souls who “seemed drunk half the time” and had to sleep on the rooftops in summer because of the stifling heat, those at the bottom of the social ladder, whose dwellings were unspeakably filthy and falling apart, who collected rags, bones, and driblets of coal that fell from passing wagons.
She also wrote verses for the wealthy, urging social activism:
When, cheerful, we meet in our pleasant home,
And the song of joy is swelling,
Do we pause to think of the tears that flow
In sorrow’s lonely dwelling?
Many have supposed the extreme simplicity of most of her hymns represented the depth of her intellect. This was not true. Her goal was not to compose poetry that would be admired by college professors and literary critics, but would be understood by common people.
She felt the same way about music. She apparently knew and loved Italian opera and was an excellent soprano, organist, pianist, and harpist. She knew well the compositions of Beethoven, Chopin, and Mendelssohn. But she also knew most people did not comprehend this music. The congregational hymn was for the untrained singer; music was something in which every worshipper should be able to participate. For her, the best poetry for the congregational hymn was pop verse, and the best music was the pop tune.
In November 1867, after completing the libretto for an oratorio by Philip Phillips called Triumph of the Cross, Fanny met a man who would become her most frequent collaborator and the composer of tunes to her most successful hymns. William Howard Doane was a wealthy Cincinnati manufacturer. Born in Connecticut in 1832, he began his business career at sixteen in his father’s cotton goods firm and rapidly rose to success.
Doane had a second career. From early childhood, he was precocious in the field of music. At sixteen, he wrote a song called “The Grave Beneath the Willows.” Throughout his early years in business, he directed church choirs and led various musical societies. He had a good voice and had become rather well known as a church soloist while living in Cincinnati.
Music was only a hobby for him until he was thirty, when he nearly died of a heart attack. A devout Baptist, Doane interpreted his illness as God’s chastening. He decided God wanted him to devote more time to writing sacred melodies. Almost immediately after his recovery, he compiled a book of hymns called Sabbath School Gems, followed by The Sunbeam in 1864, and The Silver Spray (coedited with Theodore Perkins) in 1867.
Doane was dissatisfied with his hymns, believing they lacked suitable words. Like Bradbury, he tried for a while to write his own lyrics, but he was no poet, and the lyricists he engaged were no better.
That November, while in New York, he visited a friend, Rev. Dr. W. C. Van Meter, who directed what was known as the Five Points Mission. Van Meter knew Doane wrote hymn tunes and asked him for a melody to use on the anniversary of the founding of his mission. Doane replied that the melody would be no problem, but did Van Meter have words? Van Meter gave him a poem he thought might be suitable.
Doane did not like it and searched through his briefcase in vain for something better. Then, kneeling on the floor of his hotel room in prayer, he asked God to send him a poem for the celebration. He also asked God, as he had asked Him many times before, to send him a poet who could supply religious verse suitable for music.
At once, he heard a knock on the door. Opening it, he saw a little boy with an envelope addressed to him. The letter read: Mr. Doane: I have never met you, but I feel impelled to send you this hymn. May God bless it. It was signed, Fanny Crosby. Accompanying the note was a poem that began as follows:
More like Jesus would I be,
Let my Saviour dwell with me,
Fill my soul with peace and love,
Make me gentle as the dove;
More like Jesus as I go,
Pilgrim, in this world below;
Poor in spirit would I be—
Let my Saviour dwell in me.
The words seemed veritably to sing themselves to him. What song could be more appropriate for the anniversary of a home mission than one that appealed to God for the grace to be “more like Jesus”?
THE WORDS SEEMED VERITABLY TO SING THEMSELVES TO HIM.
Doane had no trouble writing a gentle, easy tune for these words. He once again prayed, giving thanks to the Almighty for sending him not only the poem but his long-sought poet.
At a neighboring church the next day, Van Meter pumped the organ while Doane played and sang the hymn. Van Meter burst into tears, so emotionally affected he had to stop pumping. He came from behind the organ, his eyes shining, and threw both arms around Doane’s neck, crying, “Oh, Doane, where did you get that poem?”
Doane told him and inquired about the author. Van Meter gave him Fanny’s address. Doane had too many commitments to call on her during that trip, but he resolved to do so the next time he was in New York.
Bradbury was slowly and painfully dying of consumption. Because of his illness and his inability to set her poems to music anymore, Fanny had been urged by Bradbury’s friend, Robert Lowry, to send her latest poem to Doane.
In his farewell talk with her, Bradbury instructed Fanny to “take up my life work where I lay it down.” He wanted her to assume leadership in the Sunday school hymn movement when he was dead. Racked with excruciating pain, he died in January 1868 at fifty-one.
Fanny was heartbroken. At his funeral, in compliance with a request the composer had made shortly before he died, the choir sang the first hymn he and Fanny had written together: “We Are Going, We Are Going to a Home Beyond the Skies.” Filing by the casket, Fanny broke down in tears. It was then that she heard a mysterious voice, “clear and beautiful,” that said to her, “Fanny, pick up the work where Bradbury has left it. Take your harp from the willow, and dry your tears.”
Several others heard the voice but could not determine its source.