Praise the one who breaks the darkness

Howard “Rusty” Edwards (b. 1955), the author of this hymn, was educated at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan and at the University of Nebraska (Bachelor of Music Education, 1976).  He earned an M. Div. from Luther Seminary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (St Paul, Minnesota) in 1985 and a degree in creative ministry from the Graduate Theological Foundation in Indiana in 1990.  He was ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1985 and has served as minister in a number of churches; he retired as Senior Minister of Christ Lutheran Church in Marietta, Georgia in 2015.  In that year he received an honorary Div. D. from Lenoir-Rhyne University in North Carolina.  Edwards has written or co-written six collections of hymns, including The Yes of the Heart: Faith, Hope and Love Songs (1993) and Uncommon Mercy: Songs from a Dozen Lands (2013), a compilation of tunes and texts by Edwards along with texts by many international poets.  “Praise the one” was written in 1986, when Edwards had written more tunes than texts; he says that the Holy Spirit moved him to write this and later texts.

 

The tune for Edwards’ hymn is Nettleton, first published in 1813 in 

John Wyeth’s Repository of Sacred Music Part Second, where it is called “Hallelujah.” Wyeth, a printer of shape-note music in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, had published Repository of Sacred Music in 1810, but the two books have little in common.  Part Second was intended to supply to the musical needs of the revivalism that flourished in Pennsylvania at the time.  In this publication the tune accompanies the hymn “Come thou fount of every blessing” written by the English dissenter Robert Robinson in the mid-18th century.  Wyeth gave neither the author’s name nor the composer’s for any of the hymns, and he himself had no musical training.  The Reverend Elkanah Kelsey Dare, a Presbyterian minister and Wyeth’s musical associate, is known to have composed a dozen hymn tunes, but Nettleton is not among them.  Dare, a champion of American music, was, however, much engaged in collecting folk tunes, of which this is one.  Shape-note music expert George Pullen Jackson notes that the tune belongs to the folksong group “Go tell Aunt [name] the old grey goose is dead.”  It may be Dare who first brought the tune into prominence as a hymn tune.  In the mid-19th century the tune became associated in some minds with the well-known evangelical preacher Asahel Nettleton (1783-1844), who was neither a composer nor a writer, but he had published a volume of Village Hymns in 1820.  Nettleton’s hymn book, however, contains no music.  The tune is called Nettleton and paired with Robinson’s hymn first in Temple Melodies, compiled by Darius Eliot Jones (New York, 1851).  The hymn is sometimes paired with the Sacred Harp tune Beach Spring.