Mary M. Brown

Mary M. Brown (1856–1918) was an American teacher, poet, Baptist laywoman, and hymn writer whose surviving reputation rests chiefly on the consecration song now known as “I’ll Go Where You Want Me to Go.” Born at Natick, Rhode Island, on May 19, 1856, she was the daughter of Joseph R. C. Brown and Lydia A. Higgins Brown. She was educated in Rockport, Massachusetts, later trained at the Normal School in Norwich, Connecticut, and taught first in Norwich and then for more than twenty years in the Jewett City schools.

Brown was active in the Jewett City Baptist Church, where she taught Sunday school and participated in the Ladies’ Aid Society and Mission Circle. Her 1918 obituary described her as a gifted literary woman whose occasional verse was frequently requested locally. Although very little of her poetry survives, contemporary and local evidence identifies her as the Mary M. Brown credited in the earliest printings of “Go, Stand and Speak” in 1891 and 1892. Those printings name Brown as the text author, while Charles Edward Prior supplied the original musical setting.

Later hymnals sometimes assign only the first stanza to Brown and stanzas two and three to Prior. That attribution rests on later recollections rather than direct contemporary documentation, and surviving testimony is conflicting; Brown’s niece remembered her aunt laboring over all three stanzas. The earliest located publications therefore provide the strongest documentary basis for crediting Brown with the text while acknowledging the later dispute. Brown remained in Jewett City until her death at Backus Hospital in Norwich on January 22, 1918. Her life joined public-school teaching, Baptist congregational service, and a modest but durable contribution to gospel hymnody.