I am weak, but Thou art strong;
Jesus, keep me from all wrong;
I’ll be satisfied as long
As I walk, let me walk close to Thee.
Just a closer walk with Thee,
Grant it, Jesus, is my plea,
Daily walking close to Thee,
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
Through this world of toil and snares,
If I falter, Lord, who cares?
Who with me my burden shares?
None but Thee, dear Lord, none but Thee.
When my feeble life is o’er,
Time for me will be no more;
Guide me gently, safely o’er
To Thy kingdom shore, to Thy shore.
Note: the later verse(s) below have been reconstructed from historical memory and may not be word-for-word identical to the original published text.
Public domain hymn text (Early 20th century). Words by Anonymous.
The Story Behind the Hymn
This hymn's original author and composer remain unknown, and unlike most other hymns in this collection it cannot be traced to a single identifiable writer or a specific dateable moment of composition. It appears to have emerged sometime in the early twentieth century out of the shared African American gospel and spiritual singing tradition of the American South, circulating for a period through oral performance and informal hymnal reprinting before any single fixed version became standard.
The hymn gained especially wide popular recognition through its frequent use in New Orleans-style jazz funeral processions, where it has long been one of the standard pieces played and sung both during the somber walk to the cemetery and, in an entirely different, upbeat arrangement, during the celebratory 'second line' procession that traditionally follows burial in that specific regional funeral custom — one hymn serving both the grief and the eventual joy of the same funeral tradition, depending entirely on the tempo and instrumentation applied to it.
Its plain, unadorned language — 'I am weak, but Thou art strong' — and its simple, repeated plea for nothing more than a 'closer walk' rather than any dramatic spiritual breakthrough gave it broad appeal well beyond its regional and denominational origins, and it was recorded across the twentieth century by an unusually wide range of performers spanning gospel, jazz, blues, and country music, including Mahalia Jackson, Patsy Cline, and Elvis Presley, among many others, each recording carrying the same anonymous, communally authored words into a different musical setting entirely.
That a hymn with no known individual author has proven so durably adaptable across so many distinct musical genres and cultural contexts — solemn funeral dirge, joyful brass-band celebration, gospel testimony, and secular popular recording alike — speaks to something genuinely unusual about its plain, universally relatable request for simple companionship with Christ amid ordinary daily weakness, a request specific enough to feel personal yet plain enough to belong to no single writer or tradition alone.
