150. Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed

The Story Behind the Hymn

Isaac Watts, already discussed extensively elsewhere in this collection, wrote this hymn's original text in 1707, part of the same landmark 'Hymns and Spiritual Songs' collection that also produced 'When I Survey the Wondrous Cross' (hymn 20) and 'Come, We That Love the Lord' (the basis for hymn 74, 'Marching to Zion'). Watts's original text ran to five verses without any repeated chorus, in keeping with the more formal, unadorned hymn style typical of his own era, more than a century before the gospel-song tradition of verse-and-chorus structure became standard.

The hymn's now-famous chorus, beginning 'at the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light,' was not written by Watts at all, and was added considerably later, in 1885, by Ralph E. Hudson, an American gospel song composer working within the very different, considerably more emotionally direct musical tradition of late nineteenth-century American revivalism — Hudson's addition transformed Watts's originally formal, meditative eighteenth-century hymn into a rousing, chorus-driven gospel song, and the combined hymn is now often published under the alternate title 'At the Cross,' after Hudson's added refrain rather than Watts's own original opening line.

Watts's own theological question, self-deprecatingly describing himself as 'such a worm' unworthy of Christ's sacrifice, reflects the deliberately humbling, self-examining tone characteristic of much Calvinist devotional writing of his era, a stark contrast to Hudson's later, considerably more triumphant and emotionally uplifting added chorus — meaning the completed hymn as commonly sung today moves, verse by verse, between Watts's own sober eighteenth-century self-examination and Hudson's confident nineteenth-century celebration, two writers working nearly two centuries apart brought together into a single continuous piece of congregational song.