Lyrics
Are you weary, are you heavy hearted?
Tell it to Jesus, tell it to Jesus;
Are you grieving over joys departed?
Tell it to Jesus alone.
Tell it to Jesus, tell it to Jesus,
He is a friend that's well known;
You've no other such a friend or brother,
Tell it to Jesus alone.
Do the tears flow down your cheeks unbidden?
Tell it to Jesus, tell it to Jesus;
Have you sins that to men's eyes are hidden?
Tell it to Jesus alone.
Do you fear the gathering clouds of sorrow?
Tell it to Jesus, tell it to Jesus;
Are you anxious what shall be tomorrow?
Tell it to Jesus alone.
Are you troubled at the thought of dying?
Tell it to Jesus, tell it to Jesus;
For Christ's coming kingdom are you sighing?
Tell it to Jesus alone.
Public domain hymn text and tune (1876). English words by Jeremiah Eames Rankin; tune DAYTON by Edmund S. Lorenz.
The Story Behind the Hymn
"Tell It to Jesus" began, unusually for a hymn now sung almost exclusively in English, as a German text. Edmund S. Lorenz, only twenty-two years old and already editing hymnals for the United Brethren Church, wrote "Sag es Jesu" — roughly, "tell it to Jesus alone" — for a German-language collection called Pilgerlieder in 1876, aimed at German-speaking congregations in America.
Jeremiah Eames Rankin, an American minister and hymn writer perhaps better known today as the author of "God Be with You Till We Meet Again," encountered Lorenz's German text not long afterward and produced the English version sung today, first appearing in print in the Sunday school songbook Songs of Grace, which Lorenz himself edited. The two men — one a hymn tune composer working largely within the German-American church, the other an English-language pastor and prolific translator — together turned a modest German devotional song into a hymn that would circulate far beyond either of their original congregations.
The hymn's structure is built entirely around a single, repeated pastoral instruction rather than a theological argument: whatever the trouble named in a given verse — unbidden tears, hidden sin, fear of tomorrow, fear of death itself — the answer offered is always the same simple act, repeated as both refrain and title: tell it to Jesus.
Lorenz went on to found the Lorenz Publishing Company in Dayton, Ohio — the tune's name, DAYTON, commemorates the city where his long career in church music publishing was based — while his young German hymn, translated into English by a friend and colleague, quietly became one of the standard invitation and comfort hymns of English-language Protestant worship.
