There’s Within My Heart a Melody

There’s within my heart a melody – Author: Luther B. Bridgers (1910) Tune: SWEETEST NAME (Bridgers) Published in 183 hymnals.  uther Burgess Bridgers (1884-1948) was a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Born in North Carolina, he attended Asbury Seminary in Kentucky. Though he did not graduate, he was the pastor of congregations in Kentucky, North Carolina, and Georgia. In addition to pastorates, he served as an evangelist in the southern United States and abroad, including mission activities in Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and Russia.  At first glance, this hymn appears to be a quintessential example of a song of amazing faith born out of tragedy.  If one visits Internet sources, various heart-rending accounts exist about “There’s within my heart,” some with immense detail of the events surrounding the creation of this hymn. It is common for some writers about hymns to fill in the gaps in a story with imagination rather than fact. Scholars agree that Bridgers experienced an immense loss in his life. While he was preaching a revival at Middlesboro, Kentucky, Bridgers left his wife and three small sons with her parents in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. At the conclusion of the revival, March 26, 1911, he received a call that his wife, Sarah, and all three sons, ages five, three, and seven months, had lost their lives in a fire. The date of the tragic fire — March 26, 1911 — is crucial because numerous writers have attempted to link the composition of the gospel song with this event. However, as hymnologist William Reynolds, writer of this column for ten years, has demonstrated, the song was penned the previous year in 1910. Reynolds provided the following correspondence to the Rev. Carlton Young, editor of The UM Hymnal:     “[The hymn] was first published in [The Revival No. 61] 1910 by Charlie D. Tillman, a well-known publisher in [Atlanta,] Georgia. When [Bridgers] had finished the words, [he] picked out the melody on the piano, and his wife’s sister wrote down the notes he played to complete the song.”  Perhaps the best evidence that this hymn was not written as a response to a tragic event is internal to the hymn itself. Dorsey and Spafford both composed hymn texts and tunes that come from the sorrow of loss and work through their grief in a meaningful way. Bridgers’ text and tune, if it had been written immediately following the death of his entire family, would certainly not follow a normal pattern of grief with its jaunty melody. One might assume under the circumstances that the composer was in denial.