Blanche Kerr Brock

Blanche Marie Kerr Brock was born in Greens Fork, Indiana, on February 3, 1888. She received formal musical training at the Indianapolis Conservatory of Music and the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. A singer, pianist, composer, and harmonist, she married minister and evangelist Virgil P. Brock in 1914. Their partnership joined his facility with devotional language and spontaneous melodic ideas to her ability to write, shape, and harmonize music for publication and performance. Together they traveled in evangelistic work and later became closely associated with the gospel-music community at Winona Lake, Indiana.

The published credits for Beyond the Sunset consistently assign the words to Virgil and the music to Blanche. Virgil's later account says that he sang an opening idea during the conversation that prompted the song; Blanche's trained musicianship at the piano turned the developing material into the finished setting. Her other collaborations with him include He's a Wonderful Savior to Me, Sing and Smile and Pray, Resting in His Love, and Let God Have His Way. Beyond the Sunset became the most widely indexed of her tunes, appearing across scores of hymnals and later under such tune labels as BROCK and SUNSET. Blanche died at Winona Lake on January 3, 1958. She is buried at Oakwood Cemetery in Warsaw, where the monument shared with Virgil commemorates the song that made their partnership most widely known.