Jesus, Hold My Hand

 Albert Edward Brumley This 28-year old native Oklahoman wrote about a journey that was still in its early stages for himself in the 1930s, but one for which he wanted help, thinking it would be a trip still full of challenges. Albert Brumley had seen enough by 1933 when he wrote “Jesus, Hold My Hand” that should have given him reason to pause. Looking back as he neared life’s end some forty years later, Brumley surely would have said that the request he made with his song title must have been answered. Just look at the times during which Albert Brumley lived, and the facts we know about his life, and one gets a sense of what background events probably affected his mind and spirit in 1933 when he wrote the words to “Jesus, Hold My Hand”.  He’d grown up in what on the surface looked like a lowly sharecropping (cotton) family life, except that his parents provided lots of musical inspiration for him, besides an appreciation for a hard-working farm life. Predictably, he had little or no money, particularly when he set off from his Oklahoma home for schools in Arkansas and Missouri. His dependence on Eugene Bartlett for much of his formal music education cannot be underestimated during his time in Arkansas at the Hartford Music Institute. Another crucial influence in young Albert’s life was the woman, Goldie Schell, whom he would marry in 1931 at age 26. She was, like Albert, a product of singing schools, and so was a match for this budding composer. It’s said that she was largely responsible for keeping her disorganized, eccentric spouse on track as he routinely scribbled musical suggestions to himself on scraps of paper or whatever else was handy. Though they aren’t included in biographies of him, one wonders how the larger events of his early life –World War I and the Great Depression—may have affected his outlook on life and its fragility. They certainly didn’t dim his productivity, which was over 800 hymns during his lifetime.  Was “Jesus, Hold My Hand” a request for continued divine presence through the methods Albert had already experienced in his life? ‘Sinking sand’, ‘the foe’, ‘hear my feeble plea’, and ‘protect me’ indeed resound like danger signs from a guy who’d been dodging troubles, despite the positive vibes we might read in biographic sketches of Albert Brumley. He surely must have suspected that God’s methods had already been at work – including from initially his parents, to Eugene Bartlett, to his wife Goldie. Was there a specific episode, or was Albert soliciting His assistance for the broader sweep of his coming life? Perhaps it was both, but what do you think Albert might have said years later was the response he got? As his life drew to a close, this once-poor sharecropper had many songs published in multiple languages, had established his own publishing company (which one son still operates), and had become part of three different Halls of Fame (Nashville Songwriters, Gospel Music, and Oklahoma Music Halls of Fame