He Leadeth Me

with
[Stephen Foster]
HE LEADETH ME
 

I. Origins

The author of the text, Joseph H. Gilmore (1834–1918), was a graduate of Brown University (1858) and Newton Theological Institution (1861), and was ordained as a Baptist pastor (1862), initially serving a Baptist church in Fisherville, New Hampshire. In 1863–1864, he edited the Daily Monitor (Concord, NH) and served as a secretary for his father, Joseph A. Gilmore, governor of New Hampshire. After a few years as pastor of Second Baptist Church, Rochester, NY (1865–1868), he spent the remainder of his career as a professor of logic, rhetoric, and English literature at the University of Rochester (1868–1911).

Late in his life, Gilmore provided at least two accounts of how he wrote “He Leadeth Me”: a brief account for Ira Sankey’s book My Life and the Story of the Gospel Hymns (1906),[1] and a more detailed account for the December 1911 issue of The Brown Alumni Monthly. A portion of the longer account is given here:

Nearly half a century ago, as a young man who had recently graduated from Brown University and Newton Theological Institution, I was supplying, for a couple of Sundays, the pulpit of the First Baptist Church in Philadelphia. At their mid-week service—on the 26th of March, 1862—I set out to give the people an exposition of the twenty-third Psalm, which I had given before on three or four different occasions. But this time I did not get farther than the words, “He leadeth me”—those words took hold of me as they never had done before. I saw in them a significance and beauty of which I had never dreamed. It was the darkest hour of the War of the Rebellion. I did not refer to that fact (that is, I don't think I did), but it may, subconsciously, have led me to realize that the fact of God's leadership is the one significant fact in human experience—that it makes no difference how we are led, or whither we are led, so long as we are sure that God is leading us.

At the close of the meeting a few of us, in the parlor of my host, good Deacon Wattson, who resided next door to the church, kept on talking about the thought which I had emphasized; and then and there, on a blank page of the brief from which I had intended to speak, I pencilled the hymn, handed it to my wife, and thought no more about it. It occurred to her months afterward to send the hymn to The Watchman and Reflector, a paper published in Boston, where it was first printed. In that paper it attracted the attention of William B. Bradbury, who slightly modified the refrain and set the hymn to the music which has done so much to promote its popularity. As I wrote the hymn, the refrain consisted of only two lines:

He leadeth me! He leadeth me!
By His own hand he leadeth me.

Mr. Bradbury added the lines:

His faithful follower I would be,
For by His hand He leadeth me.

In other respects the hymn stands just as I wrote it in Deacon Wattson’s parlor, talking and writing at the same time. I did not know that my hymn had been set to music til 1865, when I went to Rochester to preach as a candidate before the Second Baptist Church. Going into their chapel on the day that I reached the city, I took up a hymnal to see what they sang, and it opened to my own hymn, “He Leadeth Me.” I accepted it as an indication of divine guidance, and have no doubt now that I was right.

The hymn has been translated into different languages—perhaps more than any other modern hymn, as it appeals especially to the wanderer and the outcast—and I have received many touching testimonials to the comfort and help it has rendered God’s dear children. It was to that end, I take it, that He put it into my mind and heart when, as it must be seen, I hadn’t the faintest conception of what I was doing.[2]

II. Early Publications

The hymn was first published in the Christian Watchman & Reflector (Boston), 4 Dec. 1862, p. 4 (Fig. 1), headed by the key phrase from Psalm 23, “He leadeth me beside still waters.” This original version was given in four stanzas of four lines, with a two-line refrain, and it was signed “Contoccook,” which is the name of a lake, river, and village in New Hampshire, near Concord. The river flows next to Fisherville (now called Penacook), where Gilmore served his first pastorate.

Notice also how this version of the text begins with a quote of the Psalm, “He leadeth me!” followed by a reflection on it—“O blessed thought!” Very few subsequent printings preserved the quotation marks around the first three words.

From this printing, the hymn was picked up by other editors. The hymn appeared in Waters’ Choral Harp (1863 | Fig. 2), edited by Horace Waters, with the text labeled “W.R.” and a tune written for it by famed American composer Stephen Collins Foster (1826–1864). In the preface to his collection, Waters issued a stern warning against copyright infringement, insisting, “Persons wishing to reprint any of these pieces for any purpose, must first obtain permission of the author,” which begs the question of whether he had obtained permission to use this text from the newspaper, and if he had, why the newspaper did not provide the author’s real name. In spite of Foster’s popularity, his tune for this hymn has not endured.

A year later, another prominent composer, William Bradbury (1816–1868), offered his own tune in two collections he edited, Golden Censer (1864 | Fig. 3) and the Devotional Hymn and Tune Book (1864 | Fig. 4). In both cases, the tune was indexed as HE LEADETH ME. Neither text nor tune were credited in these early collections. Bradbury did not include the author’s quotation marks around the first three words.

In Gilmore’s story, when he visited Second Baptist Church of Rochester in 1865, and he said, “I took up a hymnal to see what they sang,” he almost certainly meant Bradbury’s Devotional Hymn and Tune Book, which had been printed by the American Baptist Publication Society the previous year. This likewise accords with his lack of knowledge, because neither Waters nor Bradbury had given him credit in their collections. Bradbury’s name was acknowledged soon after in other collections, but Gilmore’s involvement seems to have been obscured for the better part of a decade. One of the earliest notices of his authorship appeared in Winnowed Hymns (1873). Gilmore included the text in his own collection, He Leadeth Me and Other Religious Poems (1877).

III. Analysis

In relation to Psalm 23, Gilmore loosely alluded to the valley of the shadow of death in stanzas 2 and 4, and to the sense of contentment behind “I shall not want” in stanza 3. Just as the Psalm points forward to eternity in the final verse, Gilmore’s text follows suit in the last stanza. “Jordan” here is a metonym for crossing into heaven, associated with the Israelites crossing into the Promised Land in the book of Joshua.

Reformed scholar Bert Polman said of Gilmore’s adaptation, “Like the Psalm on which it is based, this text confesses absolute trust in the Lord’s guidance and care, a trust that is sufficient even for ‘the valley of the shadow of death.’”[3] Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth wrote, “‘He Leadeth Me’ has the true hymn quality, combining all the simplicity of spontaneous thought and feeling with perfect accent and liquid rhythm.”[4]

Musically, Bradbury’s tune has a harmonic simplicity characteristic of gospel and Sunday School hymns of the time. The stanzas start on scale degree 5, then resolve downward to the home tone, eventually rising upward once to the higher octave, marked there by a fermata. To add intensity and interest to the refrain, the melody starts at 5 but this time rises upward, glancing briefly at a high 2, moves downward toward a resolution, but is compelled to go back again by a half cadence; it eventually concludes the second time around with a comfortable resolution down to the home tone.

Some scholars have noted peculiar performance practices, especially ones they found distracting. Bert Polman, for example, cautioned, “Fermatas, if any are observed, should come at the ends of the lines and not in the middle of line 2, as some soloists prefer.”[5] Methodist scholar Carlton R. Young was evidently accustomed to hearing excessively fast renditions, because he opined, “Bradbury . . . included a performance note, ‘Four to each measure,’ apparently to suggest that it be sung in a tempo much slower than a bright subdivided two that characterizes the superficial and insensitive accompaniment of most organists and pianists.”[6]

Regarding the hymn’s use within the context of a worship service, voice instructor and church musician Ann Divine suggested, “The hymn should be sung in connection with any emphasis on God’s providence and guidance. It could be used as a closing hymn in any service, expressing the confidence that God walks with believers in all of life.”[7]

by CHRIS FENNER
for Hymnology Archive
3 May 2022

Footnotes:

1. Ira Sankey, “He Leadeth Me,” My Life and the Story of the Gospel Hymns (1906), pp. 165–166: Archive.org

2. Joseph H. Gilmore, “The origin of ‘He Leadeth Me’ as told by the author of the familiar words,” The Brown Alumni Monthly, vol. 12, no. 5 (Dec. 1911), p. 114: HathiTrust

3. Bert Polman, “He Leadeth Me,” Psalter Hymnal Handbook (Grand Rapids: CRC, 1998), p. 616.

4. Theron Brown & Hezekiah Butterworth, “He Leadeth Me,” The Story of the Hymns and Tunes (NY: American Tract Society, 1906), p. 235: Archive.org

5. Bert Polman, “He Leadeth Me,” Psalter Hymnal Handbook (Grand Rapids: CRC, 1998), p. 617.

6. Carlton R. Young, “He Leadeth Me,” Companion to the United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993), p. 390.

7. Ann Divine, “He Leadeth Me,” The Worshiping Church: Worship Leaders’ Edition (Carol Stream, IL: Hope, 1990), no. 635.

Related Resources:

Milburn Price, “Joseph Henry Gilmore,” Baptist Hymnal Handbook (Nashville, TN: Convention Press, 1992), p. 350.

Leland Ryken, “He Leadeth Me,” 40 Favorite Hymns of the Christian Faith (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2022), pp. 70–73: Amazon

Robert Cottrill, “He Leadeth Me,” Wordwise Hymns (22 April 2019): https://wordwisehymns.com/2019/04/22/he-leadeth-me-2/

“He Leadeth Me,” Hymnary.org: https://hymnary.org/text/he_leadeth_me_o_blessed_thought