Fanny Crosby’s hymns have impacted lives for Christ worldwide for generations, but until recently 2,700 of them were overlooked in an archive, unsung and unpublished.
Now on the album “Blessed Assurance: The New Hymns of Fanny Crosby,” some of those forgotten lyrics have come to life through today’s worship writers and singers, introducing a new generation to one of the most substantive hymn writers of all time.
Fanny Crosby (1820–1915), undaunted by lifelong blindness, was “a songwriter for the people,” said Adrian Thompson, vice president of song and artist development at Integrity Music. “She wrote songs that the common man really grasped.”
Christians have sung “All the Way My Savior Leads Me” and “Rescue the Perishing” for decades, and now they can discover “No One Like Jesus,” for example, sung by Michael W. Smith on the new album.
Mike Harland, director of LifeWay Worship Resources, said, “This is a very important discovery. Fanny Crosby is already acknowledged as one of the most prolific hymn text writers in all of Church hymnody. To find a significant number of previously unpublished texts by her that can be developed for the modern Church is a treasure trove for many generations to come.”
Stephen Kelley, an entrepreneur and collector of antique hymnals, discovered the lost lyrics in 2000, and it took 15 years to publish a sampling coinciding with the 100th anniversary of Crosby’s death in 1915.
Kelley said it began when he was distracted in church one Sunday by the words of “To God Be the Glory.”
“I had sung the song for years but I never paid much attention to the words,” Kelley said. “Inside that hymn is a word called life-gate — ‘open the life-gate that all may go in.’ It’s a reference to salvation and that captivated me.”
‘Profound’
That led Kelley to an interest in Crosby, and after some research he found that her publisher was storing her forgotten works in an archive at Wheaton College in Illinois and “for whatever reason chose not to do anything withthem.”
Harland was asked early on in the project to review a sample of the discovered lyrics and weigh in on what value they may have for the Church today.
“I was amazed at what I read,” Harland said. “They were as profound as the hymns of hers we have loved all of our lives.”
Crosby, who was a Baptist church member in Brooklyn, has 15 hymns in the 2008 Baptist Hymnal, making her the most quoted lyricist in the entire project, Harland said.
Thompson said what’s exciting for him is to have Crosby co-write with contemporary musicians. “It’s not just reworking hymns that we’ve been singing for lots of years,” Thompson said. “These are works that have never seen the light of day before.”
Thompson considers Crosby a prototype of the modern worship leader. “She committed every day to writing something, which is a real task for any creative person,” he said. “She lived a frugal life. She gave her money to urban missions. She didn’t live a lavish life. She wanted to be a servant, and she had a passion for God. I think there are a lot of lessons in who she was.”
“Blessed Assurance: The New Hymns of Fanny Crosby,” includes genres as diverse as Matt Redman, Ricky Skaggs and the Blind Boys of Alabama.
(BP)
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