Noteworthy Blog

It would be hard to imagine the world of church hymns without the influence of Isaac Watts. A master poet with some 750 hymns to his credit, Joy to the World is just one of the many Watts hymns we still sing today. Published in 1719, this marks the 305th year of this hymn. It is a beautiful hymn most often associated with and sung during the Christmas season, but it wasn't based on Christ's birth. No, Joy To The World is the Christmas hymn that isn't.  Watts wrote and published the poem in 1719 as a paraphrase of Psalm 98. At that time, it wasn't set to music. An American named Lowell Mason, regarded by many as the father of American church music (and the father of Henry Mason, who founded the Mason & Hamlin piano company - the most amazing sounding American-made pianos) borrowed some lines from George Fredrick Handel's Messiah to complete a tune called Antioch. Lowell published Joy To The World set to Antioch in 1836 at Christmas time, and the Christmas associa...

This beautiful hymn was first published in 1816 in London, England. It was written by James Montgomery, poet and owner of the Sheffield Iris newspaper. You might recognize his name from another of the 400-plus hymns he wrote; Go To Dark Gethsemane. Montgomery was born in 1771 in Scotland to soon-to-be missionary parents. His father was a pastor in the Moravian brethren, and when James was 6, his parents moved to the West Indies to be missionaries. At that time, he went to boarding school, which did not go well for him, and while he was there, his parents died when he was 12. They wanted him to follow in his father's footsteps and become a minister. But he was dismissed from seminary because of his unwavering interest in poetry. James had no shortage of reasons to abandon his faith. After being kicked out of school, he struggled with homelessness and hunger. He sometimes peddled his poems on the street for money to buy food. Eventually, he made his way to Sheffield, where he got a j...