During the month of August, we’ll be looking at hymns, singing them, reading them, considering their history, background and resonance for faith and life.
For this week’s gathering, I’ve chosen “He leadeth me.” (Please consider submitting a hymn idea for the coming weeks.)
He leadeth me was written as a poem inspired by Psalm 23 by a Baptist pastor, Joseph Henry Gilmore in 1862. He led a service based on the psalm, and that evening wrote the poem “He leadeth me” in pencil and handed it to his wife. Several months later she submitted it to “The Watchman and Reflector” which published it on December 4, 1862.
The musician William Batchelder Bradbury saw the poem and set it to music (He was famously also the composer of “Jesus loves me”).
Gilmore did not know his poem had been set to music until he was preaching as a pastoral candidate in Rochester, NY, where he saw his poem as a hymn in their hymnal three years later!
The context of the hymn is striking. The nation was embroiled in the heart of the civil war. The war began at the battle of Ft. Sumter in April, 1861, a little over a year before Gilmore wrote his poem. In April 1862, the battle of Shiloh was one of the bloodiest of the war. The battle of Antietam was fought in June 1862, with the single bloodiest day of battle in U.S. history (Gettysburg in 1863 was the bloodiest battle overall, but over a three-day period).
What does it mean to write such a hymn in the context of such massive killing? Was Gilmore willfully obtuse? Surely he could not fail to notice the massive destruction all around? The hymn does speak of “scenes of deepest gloom.” And it is a hymn, as so many are, also about death: “E’en death’s cold wave I will not flee, since God through Jordan leadeth me.” This phrase is also an echo of Psalm 23, “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”
Does the hymn tremble enough in the presence of the horror of the war? The words about gloom and death are direct. But I think what ultimately gives the hymn its glory and gravitas is Bradbury’s musical setting. By my sense, it is one of the most beautiful and fitting musical pairings with words in the great corpus of hymns.
The falling, declarative tones of the opening phrase “He leadeth me” from the the fifth to the tonic (in the Key of D, the tonic is D) set the tone. The music as already well-landed by the 4th note in (that tonic). By the second line, the melody finds its way up to the octave above, where we sing “Where’er I be,” giving that “be” the high point of the musical phrase.
But what gets my attention most about the music is the chorus. Suddenly the music and words flow together in a confluence like the Mississippi picking up speed as it gathers its many waters heading to the gulf. The Mennonite hymnal features four fermatas (birds-eyes) written as places to pause the flow. Song leaders always debate how many of these to observe. I don’t like to get too stuck on the fermatas. The Mississippi must flow! But pausing on any of them can yield a moment of wonderful harmony ringing out. The chorus is “like a river glorious” (to quote another hymn). Sung with good attention to keeping musical motion going both in tempo and phrasing, it rings out in unspooling harmony, a great melodic tide.
Is it sufficient to the moment of war? The hymn has often been used in times of loss and death. It’s words and music touch the place where joy and sorrow meet. What do you think? Does this song echo in your soul?
Soul Report 