History of Hymns: 'My Life Flows On'

“My Life Flows on in Endless Song” (“How Can I Keep from Singing”)
Pauline T. (Formerly attr. Robert Lowry)
The Faith We Sing, 2212

My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation,
I catch the sweet, tho’ faroff hymn
That hails a new creation;
Through all the tumult and the strife,
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
How can I keep from singing?

Tracing the origins of a hymn can be somewhat like searching a genealogy website for information about one’s family roots. The family lineage of this hymn—both text and tune—requires some sleuthing. Those who claim it as a part of their family tree have adapted it from time to time. Yet it continues to speak (and sing) to the hearts of many.

This text first appeared in The New York Observer (1868) titled “Always Rejoicing,” attributed to “Pauline T.” The remaining stanzas follow:

What tho’ my joys and comfort die?
The Lord my Saviour liveth;
And tho’ the darkness gather round?
Songs in the night he giveth;
No storm can shake my inmost calm,
While to that refuge clinging;
Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth,
How can I keep from singing?

I lift my eyes; the cloud grows thin;
I see the blue above it;
And day by day this pathway smooths,
Since first I learned to love it;
The peace of Christ makes fresh my heart,
A fountain ever springing;
All things are mine since I am his—
How can I keep from singing?

The text appeared without attribution the following year in The Christian Pioneer (1869) Vol. 23, p. 53, under the title “Always Rejoicing,” possibly referring to Philippians 4:4.

William B. Bradbury (1816–1868) included the same text in Bright Jewels for the Sunday School: A new collection for Sunday School songs written expressly for this work, many of which are the latest compositions of William B. Bradbury (New York, 1869, no. 16) with the designation “R. L.” for Robert Lowry, in the upper right corner of the score. Bradbury died a year before the collection’s publication; thus, Lowry is the designated editor. Since the text was published a year earlier under a different name, Lowry likely contributed only the musical setting rather than the text. On the heels of Bright Jewels, Lowry included the hymn in his own Royal Diadem (New York, 1873), followed by Chautauqua Carols (New York, 1878), edited by Lowry, W. Howard Doane, and William F. Sherman. Carl Daw Jr. points out that Lowry does not claim authorship in collections in which he participates. However, other hymnals often ascribe authorship to him (Daw, 2016, p. 779).

The theme of the text and the nature of the melody have the feel of a folksong, a quality that may account for its continued use. The other-worldly quality of the text and the general range and structure of the tune associated with Robert Lowry are reminiscent of the American folksong “I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger.” Both express a longing that transports the singer above a world of suffering and strife. The third stanza begins with heavenly images of “clouds” and “blue” where Christ, the ultimate source of peace, resides. The textual variations of “Poor wayfaring stranger” are complex, but the theme, like “My life flows on,” is essentially eschatological with references in some collections to the “crown of glory” and “Saviour.”

Paul Westermeyer notes that “Though cast in the first-person singular, [the text] has the character of anonymity as, in the medieval sense of the music of the spheres, the individual joins the song that transcends earth’s lamentation” (Westermeyer, 2010, p. 625). A similar observation might be made about “Poor wayfaring stranger.” Daw cites a rich tapestry of scriptural allusions throughout the hymn, including Revelation 21:4; 21:6, Job 19:25; 35:10, Philippians 4:7, 2 Corinthians 6:10, Isaiah 25:4, and Acts 17:24 (Daw, 2016, p. 780). In this regard, “My Life Flows On” is significantly more replete with scriptural connections than its cousin, “Poor wayfaring stranger.”

Each stanza concludes with a rhetorical question, “How can I keep from singing?,” which functions as a brief refrain. Rather than a sense of finality, the open-ended refrain complements the various poignant images offered: “I hear the music ringing; / It finds an echo in my soul” (1:6–7), an extension of the music of the spheres; “And tho’ the darkness gather round? Songs in the night he giveth” (2:3–4), perhaps an allusion to Psalm 77:6; “I lift my eyes; the cloud grows thin; I see the blue above it” (3:1–2), echoing Psalm 121:1. Rather than traditional stanzas that, in succession, develop a theme, the entirety of this hymn sustains time in a single reflective moment.

Throughout the decades since its publication in Bright Jewels, various tunes have been paired with the 8.7.8.7.D text, including one by Ira D. Sankey (1840–1908), who set his own unnamed tune to the text designated as “Anon.” in his Sacred Songs and Solos: Nos 1. and 2. Combined (1880). [See Knowles Wallace, 2019, 171–185 for a more complete survey of tunes associated with this text.]

American composer and music publisher William B. Blake (1832–1915) composed another tune, dividing the text into six 8.7.8.7 stanzas under the title “The Singing Pilgrim,” adding the following refrain, which appeared in Sabbath Bells (Springfield, Ohio, 1884):

Singing, I journey on my way,
Towards the shining river,
There I shall see his loving face,
And sing and praise him ever.

The Unitarian hymnal Laudes Domini (New York, 1897) listed the text as “Anon.” with Lowry as the composer. The editors paired it with MATERNA by Samuel Augustus Ward (1847–1903) before that tune became inexorably linked with the patriotic text “O beautiful for spacious skies” by Katherine Lee Bates (1859–1929). This hymnal also substituted theocentric designations for the Christological terms. These modifications were adopted by several other hymnals:

2:2 ‘The Lord my Helper liveth’
2:7 ‘Since God is Lord of heaven and earth’
3:5 ‘The peace of God makes fresh my heart’

Other textual ascriptions include “Miss A. Warner” in The Highway Hymnal (Nevada, Iowa, 1886), probably Anna Bartlett Warner, author of “Jesus loves me,” and F.J. Hartley in Hymns of Consecration and Faith (London, 1902). A different setting by J.H. Tenney appeared in Best Hymns No. 3 (Chicago, 1903) with no mention of Lowry. Gospel Carols (Chicago, 1905) includes a tune by the famous Arthur Seymour Sullivan (1842–1900), with the text ascribed to F.J. Harley.

Uneven designations in various hymnals generally led to the gradual disassociation of the text with Lowry, even though his tune was the preferred one. The text’s use with multiple tunes was modest, but steady, until around 1975, when folksinger and social activist Pete Seeger (1919–2014) included a modified version in his collection Sing Out, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1957) and recorded it on Precious Friend (1981), an album by Seeger and fellow folksinger Arlo Guthrie (b. 1947). Seeger stated that he had learned the song from Doris Plenn (1917–1999), who, in turn, had learned it from her family in North Carolina. Plenn’s grandmother believed that it originated from the early days of the Quaker movement, resulting in the addition of this stanza by Plenn around 1950:

When tyrants tremble, sick with fear,
And hear their death-knell ringing,
When friends [Friends] rejoice both far and near,
How can I keep from singing?
In prison cell and dungeon vile,
Our thoughts to them go winging;
When friends by shame are undefiled,
How can I keep from singing?

A note in The New Century Hymnal (1995) indicates that Plenn penned this stanza “when her friends were imprisoned during the McCarthy era” (Hymn 476, stanza 3), a reference to the anti-Communist hysteria during the 1940s and 1950s championed by United States Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The addition of this stanza and the gapped scale of a pentatonic melody were attractive to folksingers. Seeger and other folksingers revived the song’s use in this form, propagating the false assertion of its Quaker/Shaker origins. (Listen to Seeger’s recording at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4nKrFLQiE0.) The inclusion of the word ‘Friends’ in its uppercase form in the added stanza, short for the Society of Friends or Quakers, is a tradition whose pacifist stance would have been attractive to social activists during the Viet Nam War. Seeger also popularized the substitution of the word ‘real’ in place of ‘sweet’ in the first stanza. Other common textual variations that have now become standard are ‘hear’ for ‘catch’ (1:3), ‘clear’ for ‘sweet’ (1:3), ‘I know’ for ‘The Lord’ (3:2), and ‘Rock I’m’ for ‘Refuge’ (refrain).

From this time to the present, the hymn has experienced a revival in Catholic and Protestant hymnals in North America and selected British hymnals. Hymnal: A Worshipbook (Elgin, Illinois, 1992), a collection in the Mennonite tradition, reconnected it firmly with Robert Lowry, ascribing both the text, with some qualifications, and tune to him in their Hymnal Companion (1996). However, an unverified source cited in the Hymnal Companion notes that “the text appears in an 1864 collection by Anne Warner and the tune dates from at least 1864 as well” (p. 580). This unverified citation along with two verified UK sources cited above, none of which mention Lowry, cast doubt on his authorship of the poem.

Assigning the text unequivocally to Lowry presents more problems as discussed by Robin Knowles Wallace (2019). While this author finds Lowry’s authorship to be doubtful for several reasons enumerated above, one may find a musical affinity between “My Life Flows On” and the general mood and theme of “Shall we gather at the river” (1864), written just five years before the publication of Bright Jewels. Finally, the fact that Lowry does not claim direct ownership of the text in collections he edited places further doubt on the situation, resulting in the conclusion that it is not likely that authorship of the text may be ascribed to Robert Lowry.

Baptist hymnologist Henry S. Burrage, a source contemporary to Lowry, ascribed the tune, but not the text to Lowry (Burrage, 1888, p. 433). Two recent Baptist scholars credit both text and tune to Lowry (Music and Richardson, 2008, pp. 323, 501). Even if publications point fairly consistently to Lowry as the composer of the tune, internal evidence suggests that the tune HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINGING (ENDLESS SONG) is uncharacteristic of Lowry’s compositions in its folk-like quality (for example, use of the “Scotch snap”), use of 3/2 musical meter, lack of refrain in original publications, and pentatonic structure. Though Lowry was a creative and prolific text writer, tune composer, and hymnal editor, this tune offers a stark contrast to those for which Lowry is most known: CHRIST AROSE for his text “Low in the grave he lay,” PLAINFIELD for “What can wash away my sin,” and NEED for “I need thee every hour,” a text by Annie Sherwood Hawks (c. 1835–1918). Be this as it may, there is much more evidence to point to Lowry as the composer of the tune than the author of the text.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, some hymnal editors modified the original flowing folklike 3/2 meter to a more regimented 4/4. Several recent hymnals retain the original 3/2 meter, however. The second half of the original stanza 2, beginning with “No storm can shake my inmost calm,” became commonly used as the refrain, an adaptation traced to the Wesleyan Methodist collection Sacred Hymns and Tunes (Syracuse, 1902) (Daw, 2016, p. 780). The first four lines of the original third stanza were deleted beginning with “I lift my eyes; the cloud grows thin,” resulting in four 8.7.8.7 stanzas with a refrain.

A multitude of anthem arrangements have been composed since the 1990s. The refrain “How can I keep from singing?” has been cited numerous times in secular and sacred recording albums. For example, Chris Tomlin (b. 1972) borrows the question as a kernel for a new song in his album How Can I Keep from Singing (2006). American historian David King Dunaway chooses the refrain for his history, How Can I Keep from Singing: The Ballad of Pete Seeger (2008). Jane Harris adapted it for her historical work Oh How Can I Keep on Singing?: Voices of Pioneer Women (2013). Loretta Cobb used the rhetorical question in How Can I Keep from Singing: A Novel (2016). Recordings in popular gospel styles (See Eva Cassidy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QAIUPwfj6o), as well as a popular Celtic-infused version (See Enya: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whIYv3_CvqU), attest to the song's persistence. The newly formed NYC Virtual Choir and Orchestra, a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, recorded a stirring rendering (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLPP3XmYxXg).

C. Michael Hawn (WITH APPRECIATION TO ROBIN KNOWLES WALLACE FOR CONSULTATION)

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

“Always Rejoicing,” The Christian Pioneer: A Monthly Magazine (London) 23 (1869), 39. https://archive.org/details/christianpionee00goog/page/n462/mode/2up?q=%22always+rejoicing%22 (accessed March 25, 2021).

Henry S. Burrage, Baptist Hymn Writers and Their Hymns (Portland, Maine: Brown Thurston & Company, 1888).

Carl P. Daw Jr., Glory to God: A Companion (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2016).

Joan A. Fyock, Hymnal Companion (Elgin, Illinois, 1996).

David W. Music and Paul A. Richardson, I Will Sing the Wondrous Story: A History of Baptist Hymnody in North America (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2008).

The New York Observer 46:35 (August 27, 1868) titled “Always Rejoicing,” attr. ‘Pauline T.

https://web.archive.org/web/20081011183054/http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~mudws/texts/singing.txt (accessed March 25, 2021).

Robin Knowles Wallace, “‘My Life Flows On’: A Multidimensional Study,” Bulletin of The Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland 298, 22, no. 6 (Winter 2019), 171–185.

Paul Westermeyer, Hymnal Companion: Evangelical Lutheran Worship (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2010).