Emily Sullivan Oakey

A graduate of Albany Female Academy in New York. Taught rhetoric, composition, and foreign languages there for 24 (or 25) years. Contributed to at least 11 magazines. Published a book of poetry, At the Foot of Parnassus.. Wrote the hymn, “Sowing the Seed” in 1850. Originally published in “a western paper,” altered as it traveled from hand to hand. Popularized by Ira Sankey. Published in Gospel Hymns and Songs. Frequently requested from Edison Records, and recorded by them in 1904. According to Sankey, she was “a frail, delicate woman, always an invalid,mnever having known, as she once said, an hour of health in all her life.”

E. Adams
Sources:
Sankey, Ira D. My Life and Sacred Songs (1906), 138-143, 281-284.
Moore, Wendell. The Edison Phonograph Monthly (Mar 1904- Feb 1905), 8.
Library of Congress. Catalog of Copyright Entries Part 3: Musical
Compositions, Vol. 16, Part 2, Nos. 8-13 (Washington, D.C.: 1921), 1512.
Oakey, Emily S. At the Foot of Parnassus (Albany: 1883), 45-46.
Abbott , Edward and Madeline Vaughan Abbott Bushnell. The Literary World: A
Monthly Review of Current Literature, Vol. X (Boston: 1879), 63.
Munsell, J. Circular and Catalogue of the Albany Female Academy (1870), 2.
Exercises of the Alumnae of the Albany Female Academy (1880), 12-14.
Historical Sketch of the Albany Female Academy (1884), 19.
Butterworth, Hezekiah and Theron Brown. The Story of the Hymns and Tunes
(New York: 1906) 435-436. Archive.org.