James Rowe

James Rowe was born on January 1, 1865, at Horrabridge in Devon, England, the son of a copper miner. As a young man he joined government survey work and spent four years in the Government Survey Office in Dublin. He emigrated to the United States in 1890, worked about ten years for the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, and then served twelve years as superintendent of the Mohawk and Hudson River Humane Society. This unusually varied working life preceded his full-time career in popular religious literature.

Rowe began writing gospel songs around 1896. Charles H. Gabriel's 1916 biographical survey already credited him with more than 9,000 published hymns, poems, recitations, mottoes, and related pieces and noted that he had been called the Bard of Albany. He also wrote librettos, stories, jokes, and magazine material and sometimes used the pseudonym James S. Apple. His surviving gospel texts include Love Lifted Me, I Would Be Like Jesus, Sweeter as the Years Go By, and You Never Mentioned Him to Me.

In 1912 Rowe collaborated directly with Connecticut organist Howard E. Smith on Love Lifted Me. Later in life he lived near his daughter, artist Louise Rowe Mayhew, in Vermont, where they supplied verses and designs for greeting cards. Rowe died at Wells, Vermont, on November 10, 1933. No precise denominational affiliation has been established in the principal biographical sources consulted.