272. Since I Have Been Redeemed

The Story Behind the Hymn

Edwin Othello Excell began his working life as a bricklayer and plasterer in Ohio, not as a musician, before his love of music led him to Chicago to study under George F. Root — the same publisher who had brought a young Philip Bliss into his firm decades earlier. Excell went on to become one of the most prolific and commercially successful gospel song compilers of his generation, eventually publishing dozens of hymnals and popularizing hymns, including the now-standard tune for "Amazing Grace," across the English-speaking world.

"Since I Have Been Redeemed" was one of his own compositions, both words and music, first published in 1884 in his collection Echoes of Eden for the Sunday School. The tune carries the name OTHELLO, very likely a private reference to Excell's own middle name rather than to Shakespeare's tragedy — a small, characteristic touch from a compiler who published an enormous body of music under his own name across a long career.

The hymn's structure repeats its title phrase, "since I have been redeemed," at the end of every single line across four verses and a chorus — a level of repetition even by the standards of gospel songs built for congregational memorization, leaving no possibility that a singer could reach the final line without having the hymn's central claim repeated to them a dozen times over.

Excell's reputation today rests more on his work as an editor, compiler, and song leader — shaping which hymns countless congregations would come to know — than on his own hymn texts, but "Since I Have Been Redeemed" remains a rare case of the compiler stepping fully into the role of the hymn writers he spent his career publishing.