19. WIDOWED
19
WIDOWED
The generation of hymn tune composers who had helped Fanny create her greatest hits were beginning to pass from the scene. Chester Allen, Silas Vail, and William Sherwin were already dead. John Sweney suffered a stroke shortly after the Moody campaign and died in April 1899. Next it was Lowry’s turn to rest. His health had been in decline, and Fanny went to Plainfield, New Jersey, to visit him at home, where he was bedfast and in pain. They reminisced about events of the past years. Finally, the dying man turned the conversation to the thing that most concerned him: his approaching death.
Fanny,” he whispered softly, “I am going to join those who have gone before. My work is now done.”
Fanny, with a lump growing in her throat, found herself unable to speak without betraying her grief. “So I simply took his hand in mine and said quietly, ‘I thank you, Dr. Lowry, for all that you have done for me.’ ” Then, echoing the words of the hymn they had written together years before, she said, “Good night, until we meet in the morning.” Lowry died November 25.
A new generation of hymn writers was rising. Some of them composed in a style identical to that of their predecessors. Charles Hutchison Gabriel of Iowa was probably the hymn writer who most aptly can be called the successor to Lowry, Doane, Sankey, Sweney, and Kirkpatrick. His hymns were very simple and had “the old Methodist swing.” Completely self-taught, he often wrote his own words, attributing the lyrics to “Charlotte G. Homer” and other pen names.
A NEW GENERATION OF HYMN WRITERS WAS RISING.
Inevitably, Fanny was asked to supply Gabriel with hymns, which she did increasingly as the years went by. Among those for which Gabriel supplied the tunes were “Hold Fast,” “Lead Me, My Saviour,” and “Sunshine on the Hill.” Like most of her hymns of this period, the lyrics she provided for Gabriel were essentially repeats of her previous works, paraphrased for the fifteenth or twentieth time.
She worked with several other younger musicians. Adam Geibel, born in Germany, like Fanny was blinded at an early age by inept treatment of an eye infection. Mary Upham, a distant cousin of Fanny’s, had been a well-known concert singer before she decided, for religious reasons, to give up singing all secular music. Victor Benke, also born in Germany, was the organist at the Bowery Mission.
The most accomplished and successful of Fanny’s younger collaborators was Ira Allan Sankey, third and youngest son of her great friend. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1874 during his father’s first overseas campaign, young Sankey from early childhood showed “an intense love for the arts, especially music.” At Princeton University, he studied to be an architect and civil engineer, but after his graduation in 1897, he could not resist the lure of his first love, and he went to work for Biglow and Main. His superior talent was recognized at once by his father and colleagues, and Allan was soon composing a large number of the tunes for the firm.
Fanny had known Allan from the time he was a baby and watched with great interest his progress as a composer. Of all the men for whom she ever wrote, Allan was the one whose musicianship Fanny praised without reservation. She wrote that young Sankey’s music was “unusually sweet and beautiful.” As much as she loved Ira Sankey as a person, she said, “the son surpassed the father in sweetness of tone and harmony of expression.”
They began to collaborate in 1899, and their work together continued until their deaths sixteen years later. More than any other gospel hymn tune writer, Allan could express the emotional power of Fanny’s poems. He set to music some of her more complicated hymns, such as “God’s Peace I’ll Know.” They were more beautiful to listen to than the tunes of Doane and Lowry, and they were more difficult to sing and play on the piano or organ.
MORE THAN ANY OTHER GOSPEL HYMN TUNE WRITER, ALLAN COULD EXPRESS THE EMOTIONAL POWER OF FANNY’S POEMS.
Their most popular hymn was “Never Give Up,” for which Allan wrote a simple, straightforward tune in the old style.
Never be sad or desponding,
If thou hath faith to believe,
Grace, for the duties before thee
Ask of thy God and receive.
Never give up, never give up,
Never give up to thy sorrows,
Jesus will bid them depart,
Trust in the Lord, trust in the Lord,
Sing when your trials are greatest,
Trust in the Lord and take heart!
Fanny considered it one of her most effective poems. It became popular in the early 1900s, when it was a favorite with the British evangelist Rodney “Gipsy” Smith (1860–1947).
Allan Sankey was also vice-president of the Leeds and Cathn Phonograph Company, and through his efforts some of the leading lights of the Moody-Sankey years were persuaded to record their voices for posterity. The elder Sankey preserved on wax the pathetic remains of his once-glorious voice with his famous “The Ninety and Nine” and several other hymns. Moody was induced to make at least one recording, reciting the Beatitudes. Stebbins, Sam Hadley, and others were recorded singing hymns. There is no evidence Fanny ever had her voice recorded.
In November Moody traveled west to conduct a campaign in Kansas City. Nearly forty years of his grueling routine had aged him prematurely. He had suffered a heart condition for several years, and now he was in constant pain. Flushed in the face, he breathed with difficulty. His frame, already corpulent, was swollen with dropsy to immense proportions. He was scarcely able to walk; the slightest exertion left him exhausted.
Moody was taken back to Northfield by rail and agonized toward death for a month. Joy came on the morning of December 22.
Back in Brooklyn, Fanny pondered what manner of man her revered Moody had been. To a reporter some years later, Fanny said of her friend, “I have never known a kinder, bigger-hearted man than Dwight L. Moody. His work was a miracle and a constant inspiration through all my work. His influence was the light—sanative and bracing.”
Fanny continued to write hymns, travel, preach, and work in the night missions until spring, when shortly after her eightieth birthday, the inevitable collapse came. She fell ill with bronchial pneumonia. For the second time in four years, she was “almost in sight of the harbor.” But her remarkable constitution pulled her through, despite a heart condition.
SHORTLY AFTER HER EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY, THE INEVITABLE COLLAPSE CAME.
Carrie and Jule had hurried down to Brooklyn to Fanny’s room on Lafayette Avenue when they were informed of their sister’s illness. This time they insisted she leave Brooklyn and come with them. Fanny at first objected, but when Hugh Main and the Sankeys seconded Carrie and Jule—and when her sisters agreed she could return to the Empire City for frequent visits—she relented.
In June 1890, she left New York after a residence there of sixtyfive years. For the first time since she was fifteen, Fanny was making her home with relatives. Carrie and Fanny ultimately moved into an apartment in a fine brick house owned by William and Sarah Becker on State Street. There they would stay the next six years.
Their rent was paid by Ira Sankey, who also sent Carrie a sum of money each month with which to provide for the needs of the poet. (He knew better than to send it to Fanny, who would always find someone worse off than she and give it away!) This dwelling, in a good section of the city, was by far the most congenial residence Fanny had ever known. The apartment consisted of five large rooms, into which Carrie moved her furniture. It was a pleasant, cozy place. The living room had a bay window in which Fanny loved to sit and rock. The parlor was dominated by an enormous portrait of Mercy, whose memory both sisters fervently loved.
Carolyn Rider was a short, heavyset woman with a long, homely face offset by a lovely smile and twinkling eyes. She has been described as jolly and sweet, especially fond of children. Like her famous sister, she was disarmingly frank, sincere, and confiding, hating pretense and deceit. She was quiet and extremely shy. For the sake of Fanny, she put up with the hurly-burly of public life, devoting her remaining years to being her sister’s eyes. “She has sacrificed her life for me,” Fanny later said of her.
For the rest of her life, Carrie would serve as Fanny’s secretary. She read to her all the mail that arrived at Fanny’s “Box 840” in the Bridgeport Post Office and wrote Fanny’s dictated replies. Every morning she would take down any hymn or poem “Sister Fan” had composed during the night. Later, Carrie secured the services of a professional secretary, a young woman named Eva G. Cleaveland, who would relieve her of much of the work. But for the time being, Carrie handled what had been the responsibility of two or three professional secretaries in the offices of Biglow and Main.
Carrie was a devout member of the First Baptist Church in Bridgeport. Fanny occasionally went there with her, but being a Methodist, she went more frequently with Jule to First Methodist Church. Although it was four years before she officially transferred her membership, from the start Fanny was active in the church. She became active in the King’s Daughters, a charitable organization connected with the church that ran a hospital and provided food, clothes, and coal for the poor.
Fanny also became active in Bridgeport’s Christian Union, an institution that served the same purpose as New York’s rescue missions. Every night there was a service for as many derelicts and drunkards as could be rounded up for an audience. Several nights a week, when she was in town, Fanny would be the main speaker.
In August, less than two months after she arrived in Bridgeport, Fanny went to Northfield, a sadder, quieter place now that Moody was gone. As usual, she stayed with Ira and Fanny Sankey. She visited Moody’s widow, Emma, and paid a final call on Daniel Whittle, who was dying of an excruciating bone disease.
Fanny spoke to the Northfield conference that year, being led to the lectern by Sankey. When the convention was over, Fanny went to Tully Lake while Sankey set sail for Britain for another campaign. He was in high spirits as he arrived in Ireland, writing Fanny that he had crossed the Atlantic with “no sickness, no sorrow, no sighing.” In Belfast, he talked about Fanny so much that a wealthy businessman gave him a present of five pounds in gold for her.
When he returned in January, however, he was completely exhausted and went with his wife to the Kellogg Sanitarium at Battle Creek, Michigan, for a rest. Fanny wrote him a letter in verse:
But, oh, a sanitarium fare—
No coffee? Well, I do declare
’Tis rather hard, it seems to me;
But doctors say—and they agree—
The sacrifice is right to make
When ordered for the stomach’s sake.
The Sankeys soon returned from Michigan. But the career of the “Sweet Singer of Israel” was just about at its close. He was remembered, but only as a figure out of the past. It was as if he were already dead. Yet he accepted this and continued the one ministry of which he was still capable: writing hymns. Fanny supplied him with many poems. Among the loveliest of their hymns of this period is “He Who Safely Keepeth.”
Fanny also still wrote for Phoebe Knapp. The rich widow, resplendent in silk and satin gowns and diamond tiaras, nearing seventy but with the face and figure of a woman of forty, had decided she and Fanny should publish their future compositions as sheet music. In that way, Fanny would be able to profit financially from her efforts more than she did when her poems were bought and published by a music company. Owning the copyright to the sheet music, she more adequately could benefit from whatever popularity the hymns should attain. Fanny insisted the copyright be Phoebe’s property, but the widow made sure the profits went in full to her blind friend.
Fanny still supplied Allan Sankey and Hugh Main with hymns, which they now published not in large hymnals but in collections of six, seven, and eight hymns. Howard Doane, however, was preparing a new full-length hymnal, which he was going to title Songs of Devotion. To assist him, Fanny went to his summer home at Watch Hill, Rhode Island, to spend the first part of July.
It was at Doane’s home that Fanny received a telegram announcing Van’s death. Her husband, whom she continued to visit and with whom she still maintained amicable relations, had been ill with cancer more than a year and in the final month had suffered a paralytic shock. The Underhills had faithfully nursed him in this last sickness.
FANNY RECEIVED A TELEGRAM ANNOUNCING VAN’S DEATH.
Fanny was heartbroken. Her thoughts went back to that June day nearly a half century before when the “voice of love” first spoke within their breasts and “all the world was changed,” when they “were no longer blind, for the light of love showed us where the lilies bloomed, and where the crystal waters find the moss-mantled spring.” Although they had not been together for years, in a way they loved each other to the end.