Forgotten works by one of the most prolific hymn writers of all time have been given a new lease of life after being recorded by some of today's well-known Christian artists.
Fanny Crosby (1820-1915) wrote an estimated 8,000 hymns during her long life, many of them still sung today. Among them are To God Be the Glory, Blessed Assurance, Pass Me Not, O Gentle Saviour, Jesus Is Tenderly Calling You Home, Praise Him and Rescue the Perishing.
For most of her life she was blind, but managed an enormous output. She wrote a great deal under pseudonyms because her publishers were unwilling to take so many contributions from a single author, including many as Frances Van Alstyne, her married name.
Until recently, 2,700 of them were overlooked in a publisher's archive. Stephen Kelley, a collector of antique hymnals, discovered the lost lyrics in 2000, and it took 15 years to publish a sampling of them.
Kelley told Baptist Press that after developing an interest in Crosby he found that her publisher was storing her forgotten works in an archive at Wheaton College near Chicago.
"Anybody could have found them," Kelley said. "Any trained musician or hymn writer could have researched them, but they languished there and at Hope Publishing since her death."
At Wheaton, he said: "They wheeled out 20 library carts containing the manuscripts. Some lyrics were on scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes, letterhead, legal paper, all with Fanny's initials. I couldn't believe it when I saw them."
On his first perusal of the lyrics, he said: "I'm in the archive literally crying because of the sweetness of her words, wearing white gloves and perusing through hymns that were handwritten on old paper, the backs of envelopes and pieces of letterhead from her publisher – or on invoices."
Mike Harland, director of LifeWay Worship Resources, told Baptist Press: "This is a very important discovery. Fanny Crosby is already acknowledged as one of the most prolific hymn text writers in all of church hymnody. To find a significant number of previously unpublished texts by her that can be developed for the modern church is a treasure trove for many generations to come."
He added: "We are watching the development of the hymns closely and will add them as they are developed into our digital hymnal resource, lifewayworship.com. We will also develop any of them we feel would be suitable for choirs into those kinds of resources."
The 15 hymns featured on Blessed Assurance: The New Hymns of Fanny Crosby include performances by Michael W Smith, Matt Redman, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Darlene Zschech and Israel Houghton.
