72. Leaning on the Everlasting Arms

The Story Behind the Hymn

Anthony J. Showalter was an American music teacher, publisher, and traveling singing-school instructor working actively across the American South during the later decades of the 1800s, a period when traveling singing schools — short, intensive, typically week-long courses teaching basic musical literacy, shape-note reading, and hymn singing to rural communities that otherwise had little formal access to organized musical instruction — constituted a genuinely major and socially significant part of rural community and church life across large stretches of the American South.

Showalter wrote this hymn's now-famous chorus in 1887 after receiving two separate personal letters, arriving on the very same day by apparent coincidence, from two different former singing-school students of his who had each, entirely independently of one another, recently and unexpectedly lost their wives. Searching for genuinely comforting and appropriate words to send back to both grieving men at once, Showalter found himself drawn specifically to Deuteronomy 33:27 — 'underneath are the everlasting arms' — and set that single scriptural phrase to a simple, sturdy, deliberately unadorned melody specifically intended to be sung by people themselves currently experiencing genuine, raw grief rather than by an already-comforted congregation looking back on past sorrow.

Having composed only the chorus himself, Showalter then specifically asked Elisha Hoffman — already discussed elsewhere in this collection as the prolific author of 'Are You Washed in the Blood' (hymn 44) — to complete the additional full verses needed to surround and support the chorus he had already written, since Showalter apparently felt more confident in his own musical composition abilities than in his skill at writing complete hymn verse text.

The resulting collaborative hymn, born directly and specifically out of one particular, dateable act of personal pastoral consolation extended simultaneously to two separately grieving men on a single ordinary day, went on to become one of the standard hymns regularly sung at funerals and during seasons of personal loss across American Protestant churches for many generations afterward, its comforting image of being held securely by 'everlasting arms' reaching vastly more grieving individuals over the following century and more than Showalter's own two original grieving former students could possibly have imagined when they first wrote to their old singing teacher seeking comfort.