Traditional American Folk Tune

No individual composer can be securely identified for the melody now known as WONDROUS LOVE. It belongs to the oral folk-hymn culture of the early nineteenth-century American South and was circulating before it was fixed in print. William Walker brought the familiar text and tune together in an enlarged 1840 edition of “The Southern Harmony,” where the setting was credited to James Christopher (1813–1844) of Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Walker later described the melody in “The Christian Harmony” of 1867 as a very popular old Southern tune arranged by Christopher. That wording is important: Christopher is best understood as the early transcriber and harmonizer of an existing traditional melody rather than as a demonstrably original composer. The tune shares the unusual metrical pattern associated with the old “Captain Kidd” ballad family and other Anglo-American songs, though the exact path by which the melody entered sacred oral tradition cannot be reconstructed with certainty.

The 1844 “Sacred Harp” further established WONDROUS LOVE in shape-note singing, where it remains part of the living repertory. Modern harmonizations by musicians such as Paul J. Christiansen, Alice Parker, Carlton R. Young, and others are later arrangements and should not be confused with the anonymous folk melody itself.