279. There’s a Great Day Coming

The Story Behind the Hymn

Will Lamartine Thompson made his first fortune in music long before he wrote a single hymn. Born in East Liverpool, Ohio, and educated at Mount Union College, Thompson wrote popular secular and patriotic songs as a young man — his "Gathering Shells from the Seashore," written at twenty-six, became a national sensation and made him wealthy in his own right.

At forty, Thompson turned his attention to sacred music. A commercial publisher initially rejected his sacred songs, so rather than abandon the work, Thompson simply started his own publishing company, later expanding into a retail business selling pianos, organs, and sheet music alongside his growing catalog of hymns.

"There's a Great Day Coming," written in 1886, reflects the starker, more urgent side of Thompson's sacred output. Rather than the gentle invitation of his best-known hymn, "Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling," this one confronts the listener directly with the certainty of a coming day of judgment, structured in three parts — a great day, a bright day for the faithful, and a sad day for those who are not — each closing with the same unavoidable question, repeated five times over in the refrain alone: are you ready?

Thompson died in 1909 in New York and was buried back home in East Liverpool, Ohio, remembered for a body of hymn work that moved, within the space of one songwriter's career, from a former sea-shell song about the seashore to some of the gentlest and some of the most searching gospel songs of his generation.