The way I heard this story back in the 1980s was that there was a woman who attended Hanson Place Baptist Church in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood during the Smallpox epidemic in the 1860s. Robert Lowry* was the pastor then, and he went to pay her a pastoral call as her husband and two sons had died in the epidemic. The woman asked if she would ever see them again, and Dr. Lowry felt his answer lacking. He went home and thought about it for awhile. and here’s the tune that emerged, as sung by The Miserable Offenders (me and Deborah Griffin Bly of blessed memory) on God Help Us, which album might bear another listen these two dozen years after its birth.
Beautiful River/Shall we gather at the river
Warning: some people think it’s too slow, but I think it gives us just enough time to pray for the dead and ponder the enormity of the realities that surround us at any given time, but especially this week.
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Here are some bonus stories about the tune, text, and the first printing:
”On a very hot summer day, in 1864, a pastor was seated in his parlour in Brooklyn, N. Y. It was a time when an epidemic was sweeping through the city, and draping many persons and dwellings in mourning. All around friends and acquaintances were passing away to the spirit land in large numbers. The question began to arise in the heart, with unusual emphasis, ‘Shall we meet again? We are parting at the river of death, shall we meet at the river of life?’ ‘Seating myself at the organ,’ says he, ‘simply to give vent to the pent up emotions of the heart, the words and music of the hymn began to flow out, as if by inspiration –
‘Shall we gather at the river,
Where bright angel feet have trod?’”
*Robert Lowry(1826–1899) provided this story behind “Shall we gather at the river,” which appeared posthumously in Ira Sankey’s My Life and the Story of the Gospel Hymns (Philadelphia: Sunday School Times, 1906):
On a sultry afternoon in July, 1864, Dr. Lowry was sitting at his study table on Elliott Place, Brooklyn, when the words of the hymn, “Shall we gather at the river?” came to him. He recorded them hastily, and then sat down before his parlor organ and composed the tune which is now sung in all the Sunday-schools of the world. In speaking of the song, Dr. Lowry said:
“…Going from Harrisburg to Lewisburg once, I got into a car filled with half-drunken lumbermen. Suddenly one of them struck up, “Shall we gather at the river?” and they sang it over and over again, repeating the chorus in a wild, boisterous way. I did not think so much of the music then, as I listened to those singers; but I did think that perhaps the spirit of the hymn, the words so flippantly uttered, might somehow survive and be carried forward into the lives of those careless men, and ultimately lift them upward to the realization of the hope expressed in the hymn.
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A different appreciation of it was evinced during the Robert Raikes centennial [1880]. Lowry wrote “I was in London, and had gone to a meeting in the Old Bailey to see some of the most famous Sunday-school workers of the world. They were present from Europe, Asia and America. I sat in a rear seat alone. After there had been a number of addresses delivered in various languages I was preparing to leave, when the chairman of the meeting announced that the author of “Shall we gather at the river?” was present, and I was requested by name to come forward. Men applauded and women waved their handkerchiefs as I went to the platform. It was a tribute to the hymn; but I felt, after it was over, that I had perhaps done some little good in the world” (pp. 132-133).
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Henry Burrage, in his Baptist Hymn Writers and Their Hymns (Portland, Maine: Brown Thurston & Co., 1888), provided this more detailed account of how the hymn was written*:
The hymn “Shall we gather at the river” was written one afternoon in July, 1864, when Dr. Lowry was pastor of the Hanson Place Baptist (now Methodist) Church, in Brooklyn, N.Y. The weather was oppressively hot, and the author was lying on a lounge in a state of physical exhaustion. He was almost incapable of bodily exertion, and his imagination began to take itself wings. Visions of the future passed before him with startling vividness. The imagery of the Apocalypse took the form of tableaux. Brightest of all were the throne, the heavenly river, and the gathering of the saints. While he was thus breathing heavily in the sultry atmosphere of that July day, his soul seemed to take new life from that celestial outlook. He began to wonder why the hymn-writers had said so much about “the river of death,” and so little about “the pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.”
As he mused, the words began to construct themselves. They came first as a question, of Christian inquiry, “Shall we gather?” Then thy broke out in chorus, as an answer of Christian faith, “Yes, we’ll gather.” On this question and answer the hymn developed itself. The music came with the hymn. The author never has been able to tell which had priority of birth. They are twins. When song had formulated itself, the author sprang up, sat down as his organ, played the tune through, and sang the first stanza and the chorus. Then he wrote it out (pp. 430-431).
NB – Burrage’s account seems to be paraphrased from an older, first-person account, repeated in many other sources without citation.
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