I need Thee every hour,
Most gracious Lord;
No tender voice like Thine
Can peace afford.
I need Thee, oh, I need Thee;
Every hour I need Thee;
O bless me now, my Savior,
I come to Thee.
I need Thee every hour,
Stay Thou nearby;
Temptations lose their power
When Thou art nigh.
I need Thee every hour,
In joy or pain;
Come quickly and abide,
Or life is vain.
Public domain hymn text (published 1872). Words by Annie S. Hawks.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Annie Hawks was a homemaker in Brooklyn, New York, who wrote hymn texts quietly alongside the ordinary work of raising her family, eventually producing several hundred over the course of her lifetime — the overwhelming majority of which have since been entirely forgotten, surviving today only in scattered nineteenth-century hymnals, except for this single hymn, which remains widely sung.
Hawks described writing the words on an entirely unremarkable day in 1872, while going about routine housework, when she found herself suddenly struck by what she later called 'a sense of nearness to the Master' so strong that she felt compelled to set it down in verse immediately, jotting the lines down before returning to her chores. She brought the poem soon afterward to her pastor, Robert Lowry — already responsible in this collection for the chorus and tune of 'Marching to Zion' (hymn 74) and the tune of 'Shall We Gather at the River' (hymn 23) — who was struck enough by the text to compose a tune for it within the same week and have it sung publicly not long after.
At the time she wrote it, Hawks later admitted candidly, she had not personally experienced any great sorrow, crisis, or loss that might obviously explain the hymn's urgent, repeated language of need — by her own account, the words arose almost entirely out of an ordinary, undramatic devotional moment rather than out of desperation or grief, which surprised some who assumed such an intensely personal hymn must have been born from tragedy.
It was only years later, after the sudden death of her husband left her a widow, that Hawks said she finally came to understand the full weight of the words she had written decades earlier as a younger, untested woman — that the hymn's simple, repeated refrain, 'I need Thee every hour,' described a spiritual reality she would only come to feel with real force much later in life, once loss had made her need for God feel far less abstract and far more like the plain, literal truth the hymn had always claimed it to be.
