10. I Need Thee Every Hour

The Story Behind the Hymn

Annie Hawks was a homemaker in Brooklyn who wrote hymn texts quietly alongside raising her family, eventually producing several hundred over her lifetime — nearly all of them forgotten today except for this one.

She described writing the words on an entirely ordinary day in 1872, while doing routine housework around her home, when she felt what she later called ‘a sense of nearness to the Master’ so strong that she had to stop and write it down immediately.

She brought the finished poem to her pastor, Robert Lowry, who was already responsible elsewhere in this collection for the chorus and tune of ‘Marching to Zion’ (hymn 74) and the tune of ‘Shall We Gather at the River’ (hymn 23).

Lowry wrote a tune to fit her words within the week, and the hymn was published soon afterward.

The hymn was first published in 1872 in a collection intended for use at the National Baptist Sunday School Convention held in Cincinnati that year, and it spread quickly through Sunday school and revival circles soon after.

At the time, Hawks later admitted, she hadn’t experienced any great sorrow or personal crisis that might explain the hymn’s urgent, repeated language of need. By her own account, it came from an ordinary devotional moment rather than from desperation.

It was only years later, after her husband’s sudden death left her a widow, that Hawks said she finally understood the full weight of the words she had written decades earlier.

She wrote afterward that ‘I need Thee every hour’ described a reality she had only come to feel with real force once loss had made her need for God far less abstract and far more immediate.