There is a name I love to hear

with
OH HOW I LOVE JESUS
EVAN

I. Text: Origins

The text of this hymn was written by Frederick Whitfield (1829–1904), a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and vicar in the Anglican church. According to John Julian, in A Dictionary of Hymnology (London, 1892), p. 1276, the hymn was “published in 1855 in hymn sheets and leaflets in various languages.” In Memorials of the Rev. Frederick Whitfield (London, 1905), edited by his son, R.S.B. Whitfield, it only notes how this hymn was written “during his college career” (p. 6; he graduated in 1859). The hymn’s first appearance in a hymnal was in A Few Hymns and Some Spiritual Songs, Selected 1856, for the Little Flock (1856), in 9 stanzas of four lines, without music, unattributed (Fig. 1).

In this first printing, the second through fifth stanzas were unnumbered and bracketed, meaning those lines were not intended to be sung, since the hymn is too long to be sung congregationally all at once. The irony of this indication is that in the United States, the stanzas most widely adopted have been the first, third, and fourth bracketed quatrains. This hymn has sometimes been printed starting with the second numbered stanza, “Jesus! the name I love so well.”

The hymn later appeared in Frederick Whitfield’s own Sacred Poems and Prose (Dublin: William Curry & Co., 1859 | Fig. 2). That collection contained only two textual differences, one in stanza 1, line 2 (“I love to speak its worth”), the other in stanza 5, line 2, “Can feel my deepest woe,” and it did not have numbers or brackets.

II. Text: Analysis

The first six stanzas start with an idea, “There is a name I love to hear,” then a series of concepts gleaned from the declaration of that name. In a touch of suspension or anticipation, the author does not reveal the name until stanza seven. In American printings, which are most often drawn from the first five stanzas, that resolution is never found (except by the presence of the campmeeting refrain, as below). The allusion in stanza three to the “little while” is probably to John 16:16–24, where Jesus told his disciples, “A little while, and you will see me no longer; and again a little while, and you will see me,” and “whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you.” The “still small voice” in stanza six refers to 1 Kings 19:12. The final stanza, picturing a heavenly throng, is closely related to the heavenly scene of Revelation 7.

III. Tunes

1. OH HOW I LOVE JESUS

The most popular tune associated with this hymn is OH HOW I LOVE JESUS, generally credited as an anonymous American campmeeting tune, not known to have been published until 1868. In that year, it was printed in two slightly different forms. William H. Doane (1832–1915) arranged the tune for his collection The Silver Spray (Fig. 3), where he paired it with “Alas! and did my Saviour bleed” by Isaac Watts (1674–1748). This arrangement of the tune included the refrain, “O how I love Jesus . . . because he first loved me,” and utilized the chromatic tones and melodic shape that have become the normative printed version.

Also that year, Joseph Hillman published an arrangement by John Baker in The Revivalist (1868 | Fig. 4), set to “Jesus, the name high over all” by Charles Wesley (1707–1788). This version of the melody is a little more simple, especially lacking the chromaticism of Doane’s version.

The connection between the campmeeting tune and Frederick Whitfield’s text, “There is a name I love to hear,” seems to have happened first in Hymns for the Sanctuary and Social Worship (Dayton: United Brethren, 1874 | Fig. 5). This printing takes its melody and harmonization verbatim from The Revivalist. Notice also the selection of the four stanzas, which are still the normative four found in modern hymnals.

2. EVAN

In the Church of Ireland, Whitfield’s text has been in continuous use since the Church Hymnal of 1873 (Fig. 6). In that tradition, it has always been paired with William H. Havergal’s tune EVAN.

Havergal’s own account of the composition of the tune was given in Havergal’s Psalmody and Century of Chants (London: R. Cocks, 1871 | Fig. 7), p. xix.

Havergal’s tune was first published in 1847 as a musical setting for a sacred poem by Robert Burns (1759–1796), “O thou dread power.” This earliest source could not be located and might no longer exist.

This tune was then obtained by another tunesmith, Lowell Mason (1792–1872), who adapted it and named it EVAN in his Cantica Laudis (1850 | Fig. 8), without attribution. Havergal called Mason’s adaptation “a sad estrangement” and did not approve of it. The accompanying text in Mason’s version is from the German hymn “Nun sich der Tag geendet hat,” by Johann Hertzog (1647–1699), as translated by J.C. Jacobi (1670–1750) in his Psalmodia Germanica, 1722 (originally beginning “And now another day is gone”).

For Havergal’s Psalmody (1871), Havergal prepared two revised versions of his tune. The original, full-length version of 16 measures was reharmonized as a four-part church tune for Common Meter Double (CMD) texts, shown in Fig. 9.

In spite of his misgivings about Mason’s adaptation, Havergal’s revised shorter version is nearly identical to Mason’s version, except being in duple time rather than triple (Fig. 10). Notice the stated date of the original composition, July 1846, and the new harmonization on 19 March 1870. The text here is from the medieval Latin hymn “Jesu dulcis memoria,” as translated by Edward Caswall (1814–1878) in Lyra Catholica (1849).

This duple version was adopted into the Irish Church Hymnal (1873 | Fig. 6) with Whitfield’s “There is a name I love to hear,” except the editors prepared their own harmonization. This pairing has endured in every edition of the Church Hymnal since.

EVAN is a versatile tune, also appearing frequently with texts such as “O that the Lord would guide my ways” by Isaac Watts, or “The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want” from the 1650 Scottish Psalter.

by CHRIS FENNER
for Hymnology Archive
25 October 2018
rev. 17 December 2018

Related Resources:

John Julian, “Frederick Whitfield,” A Dictionary of Hymnology (London, 1892), p. 1276.

“There is a name I love to hear,” Handbook to the Baptist Hymnal, ed. Wesley L. Forbis (Nashville: Convention Press, 1992), p. 250.

“There is a name I love to hear,” Companion to Church Hymnal, ed. Edward Darling & Donald Davidson (Dublin: Columba Press, 2005), pp. 183–184.

“There is a name I love to hear,” Hymnary.org:
https://hymnary.org/text/there_is_a_name_i_love_to_hear_i_love

J.R. Watson, “There is a name I love to hear,” Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology:
http://www.hymnology.co.uk/t/there-is-a-name-i-love-to-hear