Shall We Gather at the River

Robert Lowry did not set out to be remembered as a hymn writer. He trained for the Baptist ministry at the University at Lewisburg, was ordained in 1854, and spent the following decades pastoring Baptist congregations across Pennsylvania and New York, first at West Chester, then Bloomingdale in New York, then Hanson Place Baptist Church in Brooklyn, where he was serving in July 1864 when Shall We Gather at the River came out of him in a single afternoon. By his own account he was lying on a lounge, exhausted by the summer heat, turning over a complaint about the hymn writing of his own era, that it dwelt constantly on the river of death and almost never on the different river scripture actually describes flowing from God's throne, clear as crystal, in the Book of Revelation. He wrote both the words and the music that afternoon, unusual for a hymn writer of his period, and first published it the following year as Beautiful River, named for the church where it was written, in the collection Happy Voices.

Lowry kept preaching as his primary vocation for the rest of his career, later serving as chancellor of his old college, but his hymn writing steadily overtook it in public memory. From 1868 he spent nearly three decades as hymnal editor for the publisher Biglow and Main, overseeing more than twenty collections, one of them, Pure Gold, selling over a million copies on its own.

A hymn written by a Brooklyn Baptist pastor in 1864 ended up sung at a Supreme Court justice's funeral, arranged by two of twentieth century America's most significant classical composers, and dropped into Western films for satirical effect by a director working nearly a century later. Charles Ives wrote his own arrangement of Shall We Gather at the River, and Aaron Copland included it among the folk and popular material he reworked into his 1952 Old American Songs, placing a nineteenth century Baptist revival hymn inside a concert repertoire far from the gospel song tradition it came out of. Director John Ford used the melody repeatedly across his Westerns, sometimes straightforwardly and sometimes ironically, embedding it so deeply in American cinema's sense of its own frontier past that audiences could recognize it without necessarily knowing it started life as a hymn at all. In 1980 it was sung at the funeral of United States Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, a use with no denominational content attached at all, simply the culture's own sense of what a hymn about gathering at a river had come to mean.

That range, gospel hymnal to concert hall to Western soundtrack to state funeral, is unusual even among widely sung American hymns, and it says something about the particular kind of hymn writing the nineteenth century revivalist tradition produced. Lowry was not working in the metrical psalm tradition of the Reformed churches or the doctrinally dense hymnody of Wesleyan Methodism. He was writing plain, singable melodies carrying a single vivid scriptural image, built for a congregation that had likely never had formal musical training, and that plainness is exactly what let the tune travel so far outside the church that wrote it.