74. Marching to Zion

The Story Behind the Hymn

This hymn's original text, beginning with the line 'Come, we that love the Lord,' was written by Isaac Watts and first published in his landmark 1707 hymn collection 'Hymns and Spiritual Songs' — making it, alongside 'When I Survey the Wondrous Cross' (hymn 20 in this collection), one of the genuinely older hymn texts included anywhere in this entire hymnal, predating the great bulk of the later American gospel-song era represented by most of the surrounding hymns by well over a full century of continuous use and gradual musical adaptation.

Watts originally wrote the complete text as an extended meditation on the theme of pilgrimage toward the heavenly 'Zion,' drawing directly and repeatedly on the frequently recurring biblical image of God's people collectively understood as fellow travelers journeying together as a unified company toward a single shared, divinely promised destination, an image found throughout both Old Testament wilderness narratives and later New Testament epistles. Watts's full original text, as first published in 1707, ran to considerably more numerous and theologically dense individual verses than the shortened, more selectively edited form commonly sung in churches today, several of his original stanzas containing fairly detailed theological argument that later editors gradually trimmed away over the following generations of hymnal revision.

The now rousing, immediately recognizable repeated chorus, 'We're marching to Zion, beautiful, beautiful Zion,' was not part of Watts's own original 1707 text at all, and was instead added considerably more than a century and a half later, in 1867, by the American composer Robert Lowry — already discussed elsewhere in this collection as the composer responsible for the tune of 'Shall We Gather at the River' (hymn 23) and for writing both words and music of that same hymn during a single anxious wartime afternoon.

Lowry's later addition of this energetic new chorus effectively and substantially transformed what had originally been Watts's considerably more restrained, contemplative, and theologically dense eighteenth-century hymn into the vigorous, brisk, unmistakably march-tempo congregational favorite familiar to worshippers today, offering a particularly striking and well-documented example of how even a long-established, centuries-old hymn text could still be substantially reshaped and effectively given an entirely new popular identity by a later generation's quite different prevailing musical sensibilities, more than a hundred and fifty years after its original author had first put down his pen.