227. No, Not One!

The Story Behind the Hymn

Johnson Oatman Jr. was born in 1856 in New Jersey and initially worked in his father's mercantile business before becoming a licensed local preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Unlike many hymn writers who held full-time pastoral positions, Oatman worked other jobs throughout much of his adult life, including a period in the insurance business, writing hymns as a parallel calling rather than a primary occupation — and yet he became one of the most prolific hymn writers America ever produced, credited with several thousand hymn texts written over his lifetime, among them the well-loved “Count Your Blessings.”

“No, Not One!” was written in 1895 and set to music by George C. Hugg, a Philadelphia-based composer and music educator who wrote tunes for numerous gospel songs of the period. The hymn's entire structure is built on a single rhetorical device, repeated across five verses: a question about whether any friend, anywhere, could match Christ's faithfulness, answered every time with the same emphatic denial — “no, not one.”

That simplicity was precisely the hymn's strength for congregational use. Its repeated refrain required no explanation and was nearly impossible to forget after a single hearing, making it a favorite for Sunday schools and revival services where a large, often unfamiliar-with-hymnody crowd needed to be able to join in singing almost immediately.

Oatman continued writing hymns prolifically for decades after this one, reportedly producing new texts at a remarkable pace throughout his life even while working other jobs, and he remains remembered as one of the most productive hymn writers of the entire gospel song era — a preacher whose most lasting sermons turned out to be the ones he set to music rather than the ones he delivered from a pulpit.