106. God Be with You Till We Meet Again

The Story Behind the Hymn

Jeremiah E. Rankin, an American Congregationalist minister who later went on to serve as president of Howard University, a historically Black university located in Washington, D.C., wrote this hymn's text in 1880 quite specifically and deliberately as a closing hymn, intended from the outset to be sung at the very end of a regular worship service, functioning essentially as a benediction-style formal farewell extended to the assembled congregation before its members departed.

The hymn's own title phrase is, in fact, a direct and quite deliberate English rendering of the underlying Anglo-Saxon linguistic origin of the ordinary English word 'goodbye' itself, a word that developed historically over many centuries as a gradual verbal contraction of the older phrase 'God be with ye' — Rankin was personally well aware of this specific etymological history, and he deliberately built the hymn's entire text around carefully unpacking that same half-forgotten original meaning word by word across its several successive verses, effectively restoring to conscious awareness a meaning most ordinary English speakers had long since forgotten was embedded within a word they used casually every day.

William G. Tomer, a working public school music teacher, separately composed the hymn's accompanying tune, and the resulting completed hymn went on to become one of the single most widely used closing or 'parting' hymns found anywhere within English-language Protestant worship for many generations afterward, sung quite specifically and consistently at the formal conclusion of regular worship services, denominational conferences, and various other organized gatherings, rather than being sung at any point during the main body of worship itself, a fairly narrow and specific liturgical function that helps explain both its enduring popularity and its comparatively narrow, specialized range of actual use compared to many other hymns in this collection.