Jesus shall reign where’re the sun doth his successive journeys run 

Isaac Watts (1674-1748) published this hymn in 1719 in his Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament.  It is a paraphrase of parts of the second half of Psalm 72, beginning with verse 8 (which is the source of Canada’s motto, A Mari usque ad Mare).  From earliest times counted a “royal” psalm and associated with King Solomon, Psalm 72 in Watts’ version becomes a celebration of the kingship of Christ, written, he declares, "as David would have done, had he lived in the days of Christianity."  Modern hymn books usually omit some of Watts’ original eight four-line stanzas, notably those that reflect the growing British empire.   Modern hymnals also change the order of Watts’ stanzas and alter his words..

 

Watts, the precocious child of dissenting parents, was first educated at the King Edward VI School in Southampton and later at Thomas Rowe’s Dissenting Academy in the village of Stoke Newington (now subsumed in Greater London).   Watts had the good fortune to be taught by John Pinhorne, a C of E priest, and Headmaster of the Southampton school, and then by Rowe.  The two men identified and encouraged his natural intellectual talents; he began to learn Latin at age 4, and when he was 14 he had learned Greek, French and Hebrew.  Rowe introduced Watts to Cartesian philosophy, which later influenced his famous book of logic, a standard text in Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale for 100 years (Logick: Or, the Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry After Truth, with A Variety of Rules to guard against Error, in the Affairs of Religion and Human Life, as well as in the Sciences, 1725).  After his time at the Academy, Watts spent two years at home, during which time he wrote a large number of hymns.  Later, he was briefly pastor of the Mark Lane Congregational Chapel, where his sermons were famous, but ill health prevented his continuing there.  Watts went in 1712 to live with the family of Sir Thomas Abney, a member of the congregation and a former Lord Mayor of London, until he recovered from a fever.  Living in the Abney household afforded Watts ample time for writing his numerous theological and other works as well as more hymns.  The arrangement was meant to be short-term, but Watts remained there until his death 36 years later.   He is buried in Bunhill Fields, the traditional burial ground of non-conformists.

 

This hymn has been paired with several tunes.  The two most widely used are “Duke Street,” possibly composed by John Hatton (ca. 1710-1793), and “Truro,” an anonymous tune perhaps composed in Cornwall.  Very little is known about Hatton, who is said to have lived on Duke Street in St Helen’s, Merseyside, Lancashire.  The tune was printed in 1793 in Henry Boyd’s A Select Collection of Psalm & Hymn Tunes, where it was paired with Joseph Addison’s paraphrase of  psalm 19, “The spacious firmament on high.”  Later, in William Dixon’s Euphonia, containing Sixty-Two Psalm & Hymn Tunes in Four Parts for All Saints Church, Liverpool (1805?) the tune was named “Duke Street” and attributed to Hatton.  The tune appeared in 1805 in a collection of Watts’ hymns:  Edward Miller’s Dr. Watts’s Psalms and Hymns, Set to Music (London, 1805).  “Duke Street” is commonly used for Watts’ hymn in North American hymnbooks, as in the 1938 Anglican hymnal (the “Blue Hymn Book”) and the Common Praise of 1998.

 

Hymn books in the United Kingdom normally use the tune “Truro”for Watts’ hymn.  “Truro” was associated with eighteenth century Calvinist-Methodist communities and was first printed in MUSICA SACRA,  Being a Choice Collection of Psalm and Hymn Tunes, and Chants, In Three Parts, with a Figured BASS, As they are used in the Right Hon. the Countess of Huntingdon s Chapels, in Bath, Bristol, &c. (1773).  Later, it was included in Thomas Williams’ Psalmodia Evangelica (1789), which is sometimes erroneously claimed to be its origin, and Williams, the compiler of the volume, is sometimes said, erroneously, to be the composer.  In fact, nothing is known of Williams (sometimes said to be “of Clerkenwell Green”) except that he compiled Psalmodia Evangelica.  The tune was first paired with “Jesus shall reign” in a Dublin broadsheet in 1810, where the tune is called “Missionary Hymn”.