22. Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling

The Story Behind the Hymn

Will Thompson was an American composer, music publisher, and successful businessman from East Liverpool, Ohio, who built a thriving music publishing company of his own — producing both sacred hymns and popular secular songs, an unusual dual career that made him wealthy independent of any single hit — and wrote both the words and the music of this hymn entirely himself in 1880, without the usual division of labor between lyricist and composer common to most gospel songs of the era.

According to a widely repeated and often-cited account, evangelist D. L. Moody — one of the most influential and widely traveled preachers of the nineteenth century, whose revival campaigns across America and Britain drew crowds in the tens of thousands and helped popularize this and many other gospel songs among ordinary churchgoers — once told Thompson directly that he would rather have written this single hymn than anything he had personally accomplished across his entire decades-long preaching ministry. In a further, more poignant version of the story, Moody is said to have specifically requested that Thompson visit him during his final illness so he could hear the composer sing the hymn one last time in person before Moody died in 1899.

The hymn's gentle, patient imagery of Christ 'calling' sinners rather than commanding, threatening, or condemning them reflected a broader and quite deliberate shift underway in nineteenth-century revivalist preaching during this period — a move away from the fire-and-brimstone sermons that had characterized earlier generations of American revivalism, and toward a warmer emphasis on God's patient, tender, repeated persistence in seeking out those who had wandered from Him, closely tied to the parable of the lost sheep and the prodigal son.

Thompson himself, despite his considerable commercial success as a publisher of secular popular songs — some of which sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies and made him a genuinely wealthy man by the standards of his era — reportedly considered this comparatively simple gospel hymn, written for no fee and requiring no commercial promotion, among the most meaningful things he ever put his name to, a rare case of a hit-making music businessman placing far greater personal value on a hymn than on any of his profitable secular compositions.