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John Bacchus Dykes
1823 - 1876 Composer of "ST. ANDREW OF CRETE" in Services for Congregational Worship. The New Hymn and Tune Book As a young child John Bacchus Dykes (b. Kingston-upon-Hull' England, 1823; d. Ticehurst, Sussex, England, 1876) took violin and piano lessons. At the age of ten he became the organist of St. John's in Hull, where his grandfather was vicar. After receiving a classics degree from St. Catherine College, Cambridge, England, he was ordained in the Church of England in 1847. In 1849 he became the precentor and choir director at Durham Cathedral, where he introduced reforms in the choir by insisting on consistent attendance, increasing rehearsals, and initiating music festivals. He served the parish of St. Oswald in Durham from 1862 until the year of his death. To the chagrin of his bishop, Dykes favored the high church practices associated with the Oxford Movement (choir robes, incense, and the like). A number of his three hundred hymn tunes are still respected as durable examples of Victorian hymnody. Most of his tunes were first published in Chope's Congregational Hymn and Tune Book (1857) and in early editions of the famous British hymnal, Hymns Ancient and Modern.
Bert Polman
John Bacchus Dykes
W. S. Pitts
1830 - 1918 Person Name: William Pitts, 1829-1903 Composer of "PRINCETHORPE" in Hymns for Schools and Colleges William Savage Pitts MD USA 1830-1918. Born at Yates, NY, the son of Puritans, he was the 8th of nine children. He had musical ability from an early age, taking formal music lessons from a graduate of the Boston Handel & Hadyn Society. At age 19, he traveled with his family to Rock County, WI, where he worked as a rural music schoolteacher in Union, WI. He taught for several years, there and at singing schools, and for brass bands, composing much of their music. In 1857 he traveled to Fredericksburg, IA, to visit his fiancee, Ann Eliza Warren, a teacher. Along the way he stopped his horse-drawn wagon at Bradford, IA, to rest. He walked across a field and saw a picturesque wooded valley formed by the Cedar River. Viewing the spot, he envisioned a church building there. He couldn’’t get the image out of his mind. Returning home to WI, he wrote out the words to a poem about the envisioned scene, calling it “Church in the wildwood”, for his own sake. He was then at rest about it. In 1862, he was married in Union, WI, and he and his wife moved to Fredericksburg to be near her elderly parents. Upon returning to Iowa, Pitts stopped along the route at the same location he had five years before to see it again. He was surprised to see a little church being built, and being painted brown. He met with the builders and asked why it was being painted brown, finding out that it was the cheapest paint they could find.. money being tight. The church builders, learning about his poem written several years earlier, asked him to bring his church choir to the dedication and sing a dedicatory song. In 1863 he did so. This was the first time the song was sung in public. The Pitts remained at Fredersicksburg, IA, for 44 years and had five children: Nellie, Grace, Alice, William, and Kate. Pitts served as mayor of Fredericksburg for seven years, as school treasurer for 26 years, wrote a biographical local history, and was a Master Freemason. In 1865 Pitts moved to Chicago to enroll at Rush Medical College. While there, to pay expenses, he offered several songs he had written to a music publisher, who chose his song “Little brown church in the vale”, and he sold the rights to his song for $25. He completed medical school, graduating in 1868, but the song was largely forgotten for several decades. Pitts practiced medicine in Fredericksburg until 1906. His wife died in 1886, and he remarried to Martha Amelia Pierce Grannis in 1887. They moved to Clarion, IA, in 1906. She died in 1909. Pitts then moved to Brooklyn, NY, to be with his son, William, who was working for the U. S. War Department. Pitts joined Fredericksburg’s Baptist Church in 1871, then the Congregational Church in Clarion, IA, in 1906, and later the Dyker Heights Congregational Church in Brooklyn, NY, in 1909. He occasionally performed his most famous song. He died at Brooklyn, NY, but was buried in Fredericksburg, IA.
John Perry
W. S. Pitts
Ebenezer S. Oakley
1865 - 1935 Person Name: Ebenezer Sherman Oakley Author of "In life's earnest morning" in Services for Congregational Worship. The New Hymn and Tune Book Oakley, Ebenezer Sherman, M.A., son of the Rev. Henry Oakley, Congregational Minister, was b. Dec. 24, 1865, at Richmond, Yorks. He studied in arts at Glasgow Univ., and in theology at Airedale College, Bradford, and the Univ. of Giessen, and took his M.A. at the Univ. of Allahabad in N. India. He is now (1906) missionary of the L.M.S. at Almora in N. India, and Principal of Ramsay College there. He contributed three hymns to Dr. John Hunter's Hymns of Faith and Life, 1889 and 1896, from which Nos. 1 and 2 passed into the Public School Hymn Book, 1903, and Worship Song, 1905.
1. Enduring Soul of all our life. [Whitsuntide.] Written 1885; in Hunter, 1889, No. 176.
2. In life's earnest morning. [Help in God.] "Written 1885; in Hunter, 1889, No. 661, entitled Student’s Hymn.
3. 0 Holy Child of Bethlehem. [Devotion to Christ.] In Hunter, 1896, No. 360. [Rev. James Mearns, M.A.]
--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology, New Supplement (1907)
Ebenezer S. Oakley
Thomas Morley
1845 - 1891 Composer of "MORLEY" in The Cyber Hymnal Thomas Morley; b. Oxford, England, 1845; d. St. John, New Brunswick, 1891
Evangelical Lutheran Hymnal, 1908
Thomas Morley
Alberto Randegger
1832 - 1911 Person Name: A. Randegger Composer of "HACKLEY HALL" in Jubilate Deo
Alberto Randegger
