Carrie Esther Parker Rounsefell

Carrie Esther Parker Rounsefell (1861–1930) was an American singing evangelist and gospel-song composer whose best-known melody is the setting commonly called MANCHESTER or I’LL GO. Hymnological and biographical sources place her birth at Merrimack, New Hampshire, on March 1, 1861. She grew up in New Hampshire, later lived in Manchester, and married William E. Rounsefell in 1883. Sources describe her as a member of the Church of Christ and as a traveling evangelistic singer who worked across New England and New York, accompanying herself with a small autoharp.

Rounsefell’s musical legacy is concentrated in a small number of documented gospel tunes rather than a large published catalog. Hymnary indexes her settings for “It May Not Be on the Mountain’s Height,” “When the Storm in Its Fury on Galilee Fell,” and a chorus beginning “I’ll go where you want me to go, dear Lord.” Her setting of Mary M. Brown’s consecration hymn, dated 1894, became far more widely used than Charles Edward Prior’s earlier 1891 tune and is now associated with the aliases MANCHESTER and I’LL GO.

According to Rounsefell’s later recollection, a Baptist pastor in Lynn, Massachusetts, gave her Brown’s words and asked for a suitable tune. She composed a setting while using her autoharp and sang it in church, after which the music was written down and published. The recollection was recorded years after the event, so it is best treated as personal testimony rather than a contemporary composition record. Rounsefell continued her song ministry into later life, moved to Durham, Maine, and died there on September 18, 1930. Her enduring importance lies in giving Brown’s text the melody through which it achieved broad circulation in English-language hymnals.