Frank Ellsworth Graeff

Frank Ellsworth Graeff (1860–1919) was an American Methodist Episcopal minister and hymn writer whose ministry was centered in the Philadelphia Conference. A near-contemporary profile by Charles H. Gabriel in The Singers and Their Songs (1916) reported that Graeff had then served in the conference for twenty-five years and had written more than two hundred hymns, about two hundred stories, numerous poems, newspaper and magazine articles, and the book The Minister's Twins. His work therefore extended well beyond congregational song into pastoral and popular religious writing.

Graeff's surviving hymn texts show the direct, devotional language characteristic of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American gospel song. Hymnary indexes works such as Holding on to Jesus, Now I Have Peace, I Shall See Him By and By, and Does Jesus Care?, the last of which Gabriel already described in 1916 as Graeff's best-known writing. That contemporary account also records that the hymn had been translated into several languages and had drawn testimony from readers and singers who found it helpful in sorrow. Graeff's broader legacy lies in joining pastoral ministry with accessible religious verse intended for church, Sunday school, evangelistic, and devotional settings.