87. Since Jesus Came Into My Heart

The Story Behind the Hymn

Rufus H. McDaniel, an Ohio-based minister and hymn writer, wrote this hymn's text in 1914 not very long after the death of his own adult son, and hymnologists studying the hymn's specific origins generally understand its testimony of dramatic, genuinely joy-filled inward spiritual change as directly reflecting McDaniel's own personal experience of finding renewed faith, comfort, and inward stability specifically in the immediate aftermath of that particular personal family loss, rather than functioning as a purely abstract, generalized theological description of religious conversion composed at a comfortable emotional distance from any genuine personal grief.

Charles H. Gabriel, one of the era's most prolific and commercially successful gospel composers, already discussed elsewhere in this collection as the composer responsible for the tune of 'Send the Light' (hymn 60), separately set McDaniel's already-completed text to its now-familiar accompanying melody, continuing his own extensive career-long practice of setting music to hymn texts originally written by numerous other authors.

The hymn subsequently became a genuinely popular testimony song, frequently and specifically sung by individual believers as they publicly recounted their own personal conversion experiences and spiritual journeys during evangelistic church services held throughout the years immediately following its original publication, its simple, direct, immediately accessible language describing an inward 'flood of joy' resonating strongly and repeatedly with congregations for whom this kind of open, first-person personal testimony formed a regular and fully expected part of ordinary weekly worship, particularly within the broader evangelical revival tradition McDaniel and Gabriel both worked within.