Robert Lowry

Robert Lowry was born in Philadelphia on March 12, 1826. As a teenager he joined the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia and became active in Sunday school and music. He studied at the University at Lewisburg, now Bucknell University, graduating in 1854, and served Baptist pastorates in Pennsylvania, New York City, Brooklyn, Lewisburg, and Plainfield, New Jersey. During his Lewisburg years he also taught at the university.

Lowry became one of the important American gospel-song editors and composers of the nineteenth century. Working with publishers Biglow & Main and collaborators such as William Howard Doane, he helped prepare numerous Sunday school and gospel collections. His own enduring songs include “Shall We Gather at the River,” “Low in the Grave He Lay,” and “Nothing But the Blood.”

For “I Need Thee Every Hour,” Lowry composed the tune now called NEED and also wrote the refrain that follows Annie Sherwood Hawks’s stanzas. The song was prepared for the National Baptist Sunday School Convention in Cincinnati in 1872 and was published broadly in Royal Diadem for the Sunday School in 1873. Lowry died in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1899.