211. Power in the Blood

The Story Behind the Hymn

Lewis E. Jones was an American gospel song writer who wrote both the words and music of this hymn in 1899.

He worked within the broader gospel-song tradition that had, by the close of the nineteenth century, produced a substantial and well-established body of hymns built around the specific image of Christ’s atoning blood, including several other hymns represented elsewhere in this collection, such as ‘There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood’ and ‘Are You Washed in the Blood’.

Jones structured the hymn as a series of direct rhetorical questions — would you be free from sin’s burden, from pride, from stained conscience. Each is answered with the same repeated affirmation: that the specific solution lies in ‘the blood.’

That repetitive question-and-answer structure was designed for easy congregational participation and memorization, even by singers encountering the hymn for the first time.

The hymn’s third verse directly echoes the language and imagery of ‘Whiter Than Snow’, drawing on the same Psalm 51:7 image of moral cleansing already used by James Nicholson decades earlier.

That illustrates how certain core biblical images — blood as cleansing agent, snow as the resulting whiteness — were reused and recombined repeatedly across many different gospel songs by many different writers throughout this general period, rather than remaining tied to any single hymn or author.

The hymn’s driving, insistent chorus is built around the triple repetition of the word ‘power.’ That gave it a particularly forceful, rhythmic quality, well suited to enthusiastic congregational singing at revival meetings.

It remains, more than a century after Jones first wrote it, one of the most widely recognized individual hymns specifically associated with the broader ‘blood of the Lamb’ theme running throughout much of the gospel-song tradition of this era.