Samuel O'Malley Gore Cluff

Samuel O'Malley Gore Cluff was an Irish minister, hymn writer, and religious poet whose surname also appears in sources as Clough. Born in Dublin in 1837, he studied at Trinity College and entered ministry in the Church of Ireland. Hymnological authority records associate him with several Irish pastorates and with a later connection to the Plymouth Brethren. He died at Abbeyleix, Ireland, in 1910.

Cluff wrote devotional verse and hymn texts during a period when evangelical poetry circulated through leaflets, revival publications, Sunday-school books, and transdenominational song collections. His best-known text is I Am Praying for You, but hymnological indexes preserve a broader body of work under his name and its spelling variants. Because surviving biographical documentation is uneven, claims about the size of his complete literary or musical output should be treated cautiously. His lasting importance in hymnody rests principally on texts that entered the international gospel-song repertory through nineteenth- and early twentieth-century hymnals. The variation between Cluff and Clough in historical publications is a bibliographic issue rather than evidence of separate writers.