Lyrics
There's within my heart a melody,
Jesus whispers sweet and low:
"Fear not, I am with thee; peace, be still,"
In all of life's ebb and flow.
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus —
Sweetest name I know,
Fills my every longing,
Keeps me singing as I go.
All my life was wrecked by sin and strife;
Discord filled my heart with pain.
Jesus swept across the broken strings,
Stirred the slumbering chords again.
Feasting on the riches of His grace,
Resting 'neath His sheltering wing,
Always looking on His smiling face —
That is why I shout and sing.
Though sometimes He leads through waters deep,
Trials fall across the way,
Though sometimes the path seems rough and steep,
See His footprints all the way.
Soon He's coming back to welcome me
Far beyond the starry sky.
I shall wing my flight to worlds unknown,
I shall reign with Him on high.
Public domain hymn text and tune (published 1910). Words and music by Luther B. Bridgers.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Luther Burgess Bridgers, a Methodist evangelist, wrote "He Keeps Me Singing" in 1910, and it was published that year in a Charles Tillman collection out of Atlanta. On its own, it is a bright, ordinary testimony hymn about a melody of quiet trust running beneath the noise of daily life.
What has made the hymn's history so widely retold is a tragedy that followed roughly a year after its publication rather than one that inspired it. In March 1911, while Bridgers was away preaching a series of revival meetings, his wife and two young sons were staying with her parents near Harrodsburg, Kentucky. A fire broke out in the house overnight; a neighbor managed to warn the family, but Bridgers's wife and sons did not survive.
Because the hymn was already published before that fire, it was not, strictly speaking, written out of the loss — a detail some retellings blur. But Bridgers continued preaching and singing for another thirty-eight years afterward, and it is that continuation, a man going on to sing publicly of a melody Jesus keeps alive in the heart despite everything, that has given the hymn its lasting, almost unbearable poignancy for those who know the fuller story.
Sung on its own terms, without that history, "He Keeps Me Singing" is simply a hymn of quiet, sustained joy — a melody that survives ebb and flow, discord, and deep water alike. Read alongside what its author lived through in the years after writing it, it becomes something closer to a testimony kept, verse by verse, at considerable cost.
