Lyrics
O happy day, that fixed my choice
On Thee, my Savior and my God!
Well may this glowing heart rejoice,
And tell its raptures all abroad.
Happy day, happy day,
When Jesus washed my sins away!
'Tis done; the great transaction's done!
I am my Lord's, and He is mine;
He drew me, and I followed on,
Charmed to confess the voice divine.
Now rest, my long divided heart;
Fixed on this blissful center, rest.
Here have I found a nobler part;
Here heavenly pleasures fill my breast.
High heaven, that heard the solemn vow,
That vow renewed shall daily hear,
Till in life's latest hour I bow,
And bless in death a bond so dear.
Public domain hymn text (published 1755, four years after the author's death). Words by Philip Doddridge; tune HAPPY DAY commonly attributed to Edward F. Rimbault, with the now-familiar refrain added in The Wesleyan Sacred Harp (1854).
The Story Behind the Hymn
Philip Doddridge, an English Nonconformist minister, wrote hymns steadily through the 1730s and 1740s, but published almost none of them in his own lifetime — they circulated privately, in manuscript, among his congregation and friends. He died in 1751, and it was not until 1755, four years later, that his friend Job Orton gathered and printed a collection of his hymns, "O Happy Day" among them.
The hymn as most congregations know it today is, in an important sense, the work of two very different eras stitched together. Doddridge's four original stanzas are a quiet, reflective meditation on the moment of personal conversion — "the great transaction's done." The buoyant refrain, "Happy day, happy day, when Jesus washed my sins away," was not part of his text at all; it was added a century later, in the 1854 Wesleyan Sacred Harp, adapted from a secular tune, "Happy Land," associated with composer Edward F. Rimbault.
That combination — an 18th-century Nonconformist minister's introspective verses, joined to a 19th-century American camp-meeting refrain — transformed a modest devotional hymn into one of the most exuberant conversion hymns in the English-language repertoire, sung at baptisms and revivals alike.
Two and a half centuries after Doddridge first wrote it, and over 170 years after its refrain was grafted on, "O Happy Day" remains a fixture of English-speaking Christian worship, its title and refrain so well known that they have long since passed into everyday language as shorthand for any joyfully decisive turning point.
