Annie Hawks Hymn writer of “I Need Thee Every Hour”
As a child, Annie Sherwood had dabbled in poetry, her first verse being published when she was fourteen. In 1857, she married Charles Hawks and they established their home in Brooklyn. New York. With her pastor’s encouragement, she began writing Sunday school songs for children, and he set many of them to music.
"I Need Thee Every Hour" was written on a bright June morning in 1872. Annie later wrote, "One day as a young busy wife and mother of 37 years of age, I was busy with my regular household tasks. Suddenly, I became so filled with the sense of nearness to the Master that, wondering how one could live without Him, either in joy or pain, these words, 'I Need Thee Every Hour,' were ushered into my mind,”
The next Sunday, Annie handed these words to her pastor Dr. Lowry, who wrote the tune and chorus while seated at the little organ of his Brooklyn parsonage. Later that year, it was sung for the first time at the National Baptist Sunday School Association meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, and published in a hymnbook the following year. When Annie's husband died sixteen years later, she found that her own hymn was among her greatest comforts. . "It was not until long after, when the shadow fell over my way, the shadow of great loss, that I understood something of the comforting power in the words.”
Brought to you by
The Peacemaker
|