220. Take the Name of Jesus with You

The Story Behind the Hymn

Lydia Baxter was born in 1809 in Petersburg, New York, and for much of her adult life she lived as a chronic invalid, largely confined to her home by ill health. Despite this, she became known among her wide circle of friends and visiting ministers for an unusually cheerful, hospitable spirit, welcoming a steady stream of guests to her sickroom rather than withdrawing from company as her illness might have encouraged.

She was part of the same New York circle of hymn writers and gospel song composers that included Fanny Crosby and the composer William Howard Doane, who wrote the tune for this hymn as he did for many of Crosby's texts as well. When friends asked Baxter how she kept such steady joy despite years of suffering and confinement, she reportedly pointed to her habit of dwelling on the name of Jesus itself as a source of comfort — a practice that became the direct inspiration for this hymn, written in 1870, only a few years before her death in 1874.

The hymn's central idea is simple and practical rather than theological: that the name of Jesus, carried consciously through the ordinary trials of daily life, could function as both comfort in sorrow and protection against temptation. Its refrain, “precious name, O how sweet,” became one of the most widely sung phrases in American gospel hymnody of the era, appearing in countless camp meetings, revival services, and Sunday school gatherings in the decades after it was written.

Baxter wrote other hymns and gospel songs during her lifetime, but this one became by far her best known, outlasting her own name in the memory of many congregations even as the hymn itself continued to be sung. It remains a fitting testimony to a woman whose physical world had shrunk to a single sickroom, yet whose spiritual imagination and influence reached congregations she would never live to see.