6. Blessed Assurance

The Story Behind the Hymn

Fanny Crosby was blinded by a medical error at only six weeks old, when a doctor treating a minor eye infection applied the wrong compress, and she went on to become perhaps the single most prolific hymn writer in Christian history, credited with somewhere between eight and nine thousand hymn texts over a career spanning more than sixty years. Because publishers worried that hymnals would look strange if too many songs in a single collection were credited to one author, Crosby wrote under dozens of different pen names throughout her career, meaning many congregations who sang several of her hymns in a single service had no idea they were singing the work of the same woman.

This particular hymn came together in an unusually immediate, almost spontaneous way. Crosby's friend Phoebe Palmer Knapp, an amateur composer and the daughter of a prominent Holiness movement leader, visited one afternoon and played a new tune she had just written on the piano, asking Crosby directly what she thought the melody seemed to be saying. Crosby, listening closely, is said to have responded almost instantly with the words 'blessed assurance, Jesus is mine' — and reportedly composed the rest of the text within that same sitting, fitting words to a tune that already existed, the reverse of how she wrote most of her other hymns, which were typically composed as pure text first and set to music by a separate composer afterward.

Crosby lived and worked for most of her adult life in considerable poverty despite her fame, often giving away what royalty payments she did receive to home missions and charitable causes among the poor of New York City, where she also spent time personally visiting rescue missions and speaking to residents. She remained mentally active and prolific well into extreme old age, continuing to compose hymns into her nineties.

She died in 1915 at ninety-four, having outlived most of the composers and collaborators she had worked with across her long career. This hymn, with its confident, untroubled refrain describing her own life and testimony — 'this is my story, this is my song' — is often singled out among her enormous body of work as one of the clearest and most personal expressions of the remarkably steady, unclouded faith she maintained across a lifetime that included both blindness from infancy and, for much of her adult life, real financial hardship.