Shall We Gather at the River?

The story

"Shall We Gather at the River?", or simply "At the River", are the popular names of a Christian hymn first titled "Beautiful River" and later "Hanson Place". Its words and music were written in 1864 by the American poet and gospel composer Robert Lowry (1826–1899), a Baptist minister. The title "Hanson Place" refers to the original Hanson Place Baptist Church in Brooklyn, where Lowry sometimes served; the building now houses another denomination. The tune is in D, in an 8.7.8.7 metre with a refrain, and the hymn is now in the public domain.

Composers have set it again and again. Charles Ives made an arrangement titled "At the River", and Aaron Copland included another in his Old American Songs (1952). The German composer Anton Plate used it in "At the River" (2003), and the American wind band composer David Maslanka in his Symphony No. 9 (2011); Ives's version was arranged for jazz orchestra on the 2014 album Mists: Charles Ives for Jazz Orchestra. Patti Page, Burl Ives and Willie Nelson are among the many singers who recorded it, and it was sung live at the funeral of the Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in 1980.

It became a hymn of the Western film. It was one of the director John Ford's favourite hymns, and he used it in many of his best-known films: satirically in Stagecoach (1939), under the scene in which Claire Trevor's character Dallas is run out of town by the ladies of the Law and Order League, and again in Tobacco Road (1941), My Darling Clementine (1946), Three Godfathers (1948), Wagon Master (1950), twice in The Searchers (1956) and in 7 Women (1966). Sam Peckinpah used it in Major Dundee (1965) and in The Wild Bunch (1969), as an ironic counterpoint to a massacre on screen, and it is heard in later Westerns such as Hang 'Em High (1968) and Jeremiah Johnson (1972), as well as in Hobson's Choice (1954), Elmer Gantry (1960) and The Trip to Bountiful (1985).

The melody travelled far beyond American churches. In Sweden the hymn "O, hur saligt att få vandra" ("O, how blessed it is to walk"), written to it in 1876, became one of the most popular songs of the widespread Swedish revivalist movement, and a drinking song to the same tune, partly mocking the hymn's religious message, is one of the most popular at Swedish universities. In Germany it became the Christmas carol "Welchen Jubel, welche Freude", with words by Ernst Gebhardt (1832–1899). In Japan it was fitted in 1937 to the enka song "Tabakoya no Musume" ("The Girl at the Tobacconist"), which was soon parodied as a comic children's rhyme still sung today and later became the basis of a Bic Camera jingle. The University of Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia, uses the melody for its official song.

What it says

A hymn of hope in the life to come: believers ask whether they will meet again by the river of heaven, and answer that they will gather there with the saints. Its image is the crystal-clear river of the water of life flowing from the throne of God in Revelation 22:1–2, and it also recalls the women Paul found gathered by a river outside Philippi in Acts 16:13. The mood is joyful and confident.

The words