Carl Pickens Daw Jr

Carl Pickens Daw Jr. (born March 18, 1944, in Louisville, Kentucky) is an American Episcopal priest, hymn writer, hymnologist, editor, and teacher whose work has become widely represented in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century English-language hymnals. Raised in a Baptist minister’s family and in several Tennessee communities, he studied English at Rice University and the University of Virginia, earning graduate degrees in English before teaching at the College of William and Mary. He later entered theological study at the University of the South in Sewanee and received his divinity degree in 1981.

After ordination in the Episcopal Church, Daw served as assistant rector of Christ and Grace Church in Petersburg, Virginia, and then as vicar-chaplain of St. Mark’s Chapel at the University of Connecticut. He subsequently lived with the Community of Celebration in Pennsylvania and continued parish, interim, and supply ministry. His hymn writing grew from his work as a consultant member of the Text Committee for The Hymnal 1982, to which he contributed original hymns, translations, and metrical paraphrases.

Daw served as executive director of The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada from 1996 to 2009 while the organization was based at Boston University School of Theology. He later taught hymnology there and served as curator of the school’s hymnological collections, retiring from teaching in 2019. Hope Publishing issued major collections of his texts including A Year of Grace (1990), To Sing God’s Praise (1992), New Psalms and Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1996), Gathered for Worship (2006), and Prayer Rising into Song (2016). His scholarly and editorial work includes A Hymntune Psalter with Kevin R. Hackett and Glory to God: A Companion (2016), a substantial reference work on the texts, tunes, writers, composers, translators, and arrangers represented in the 2013 Presbyterian hymnal.