Clara H. Scott

Clara H. Scott was an American composer, hymn writer, music teacher, editor, and publisher whose career belonged to the expanding world of nineteenth-century gospel and church music. Born at Elk Grove, Illinois, on December 3, 1841, she moved with her family to Chicago in the 1850s. Hymnary records that she studied in the city’s early music-institute movement under musicians including Chauncy M. Cady and William B. Bradbury, then taught music at the Ladies’ Seminary in Lyons, Iowa. She married Henry Clay Scott in 1861 and later lived in the Chicago area.

Scott wrote both words and music and had compositions published in collections associated with prominent American church musicians. Horatio R. Palmer encouraged her work and helped bring some of her songs into print. In 1882 she published The Royal Anthem Book, a collection described in United Methodist hymn-history scholarship as the first volume of choir anthems published by a woman. Her later output included additional song collections, and Hymnary catalogs dozens of texts and tunes connected with her name.

Her best-known work is Open My Eyes, That I May See, first published in 1895 in Best Hymns No. 2. Scott wrote both its text and melody, making it an especially complete example of her craft as poet and composer. Other surviving work includes material represented in her 1896 collection Truth in Song and tunes such as AUSTIN and TERSTEEGEN.

Scott died at Dubuque, Iowa, on June 21, 1897, after a horse-drawn buggy accident. Although much of her larger catalog is little known today, her work remains historically important for women’s participation in American sacred-music publishing and for a hymn that has continued to circulate widely in Protestant worship.