Lyrics
What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this, that caused the Lord of bliss
To bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,
To bear the dreadful curse for my soul.
When I was sinking down, sinking down, sinking down,
When I was sinking down, O my soul!
When I was sinking down beneath God's righteous frown,
Christ laid aside His crown for my soul, for my soul,
Christ laid aside His crown for my soul.
To God and to the Lamb I will sing, I will sing;
To God and to the Lamb, I will sing.
To God and to the Lamb who is the great "I AM,"
While millions join the theme, I will sing, I will sing,
While millions join the theme, I will sing.
Public domain American folk hymn text (first published 1811). Tune adapted from a traditional American/English ballad melody, paired and published by William Walker in The Southern Harmony (1840).
The Story Behind the Hymn
"What Wondrous Love Is This" belongs to a body of song almost nobody sat down to compose in the ordinary sense — an American folk hymn, born out of the camp meetings of the Second Great Awakening rather than a hymn writer's study. Its text first appeared in print around 1811, in a Lynchburg, Virginia songbook titled A General Selection of the Newest and Most Admired Hymns and Spiritual Songs, and in a similar form the same year in a Lexington, Kentucky collection. No author's name was attached to it then, and none has ever been confirmed since, though one later hymnal speculatively credited a Georgia Methodist pastor named Alexander Means.
The tune has an even stranger past. Most researchers trace its melody back to an English ballad from 1701 about the pirate William Kidd — a tune so well known in its day that camp meeting singers, working from hymnals that printed words only and no music, simply set the new spiritual text to it, since everybody already knew how it went. That practical borrowing, common at the boisterous outdoor revivals of the era, is likely how this hauntingly minor-key melody came to carry such solemn words.
The pairing was made permanent by William Walker, a singing-school teacher and hymnal compiler who included the text and tune together in the appendix of the 1840 edition of his shape-note songbook The Southern Harmony — the three-part harmony credited to James Christopher of Spartanburg, South Carolina. Walker himself later described it simply as "a very popular old Southern tune." It went on to appear in The Sacred Harp beginning with that book's first edition in 1844, and has remained in every edition since, cementing its place at the heart of American shape-note singing.
What has kept the hymn alive for over two centuries is its unusual intimacy — rather than describing Christ's love from a distance, the singer addresses their own soul directly, asking it to marvel, three times over, at a love that would trade a crown for a curse. Few hymns manage to sound both ancient and startlingly personal at once; this one has done so since before the country that produced it had fully found its voice.
