Ask the man long known as Billy Graham’s soloist for his favorite hymn and he’ll say it’s not a fair question.
But it doesn’t take long for George Beverly Shea to pick one among the many he likes so much.
“I must admit that I have not tired of ‘How Great Thou Art,’” he told Religion News Service in a recent interview. “It’s just so marvelous and … just so foundational and scriptural and the melody is so old-fashioned and great and it’s easy to sing.”
Shea, 95, has performed solos and sung with choirs at the crusades of the famous evangelist for decades. He has also written a new book, “How Sweet the Sound: Amazing Stories and Grace-filled Reflections on Beloved Hymns and Gospel Songs” (Tyndale House).
With his deep voice occasionally drifting into song as he discusses a range of hymns, Shea said music can sometimes affect the listener as much as spoken words of worship.
“There’s certain Scriptures that might get to the heart in a hurry, like John 3:16,” he said. “Hymns, the poetry, just gets to the heart.”
The evangelist with whom he teamed has similar sentiments.
“Songs can touch and open a heart to hear God when sermons and preaching may fall on deaf ears,” Graham said in the foreword to Shea’s book. “Music is such a universal language — and God has used Bev to be an instrument to touch and enrich lives.”
The book features the lyrics of more than 50 songs, recollections of Shea about them and related “devotional interludes” by Betty Free Swanberg, a writer for Tyndale House Publishers.
Shea described how he changed the words of “How Great Thou Art” — dubbed a “timeless classic” in the book — when he sang his favorite hymn with a Toronto crusade choir.
He modified “consider all the works Thy hands have made” with “consider all the worlds Thy hands have made” and changed “I hear the mighty thunder” to “I hear the rolling thunder.”
Those alterations from 1955 have endured among congregations and celebrities.
“I got a bang when I used to hear Elvis Presley sing my two words,” Shea said.
In that same year, the crusade singer wrote the words and music to “The Wonder of It All.” Composed on an ocean liner, Shea was inspired by a Jewish publisher who inquired about why so many attended Graham’s crusades.
The musician told him of the volunteer choir and the preaching and said, “Oh, sir, if you could see it, the wonder of it all!”
The publisher challenged him to write a song of that title. Finding himself awake in the wee hours of the next morning, Shea composed a song about the “the wonder of the sunset” he’d seen over the ocean and “the wonder that God loves me.”
Shea, who has written the music to other hymns, continues to improvise on the organ in his home — and even volunteered to put the phone down and play a few notes for a listening reporter on his three-manual instrument with 800 pipes that dates to 1926.
The longtime singer was literally brought up on church music, waking on school days to his mother singing the chorus of a song that began “Singing I go along life’s road, praising the Lord, praising the Lord.” He took the bass part when his family gathered around the dinner table to sing the Doxology.
He would flip through the pages of the church hymnal as his father preached in churches in Houghton, N.Y. “The rustle of the pages might have been a little distracting, but I know he forgave me,” Shea wrote.
When he was 23, Shea composed the music to the hymn “I’d Rather Have Jesus” when he was still determining his career. A few years later, with that song in mind, he declined an offer to sing with a secular group and began working for a Christian radio station in Chicago.
While at WMBI he performed on a morning program he started called “Hymns from the Chapel.” In 1943, Graham heard the show and invited Shea to sing on the evangelist’s new radio program. So began a friendship that has lasted for decades.
Shea, who lives in Montreat, N.C., about a mile from Graham, said the man 10 years his junior used to honk his horn as he drove by. Now, they speak on the phone.
Their song and sermon combination continues. Shea will take part in Graham’s Kansas City, Mo., crusade in June and in the Los Angeles crusade later this year. He’s also slated to sing in Graham’s return to Madison Square Garden in 2005.
Apparently the evangelist would hear nothing of it when Shea suggested to Graham and crusade choir director Cliff Barrows that it was time for him to retire.
“Billy said, ‘You’re afraid you’re going to lose your teeth or something?’” Shea recalled. “‘If you do, just come and whistle.’” (BP, RNS)
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