William Shakespeare Hays

William Shakespeare Hays, usually known as Will S. Hays, was an American songwriter, journalist, and sometime steamboat captain born in Louisville, Kentucky. He wrote hundreds of popular songs during the nineteenth century and worked for Louisville newspapers, including the “Courier-Journal.” His song “Mollie Darling” became one of his major commercial successes.

The melody underlying the hymn tune now called SALVATIONIST comes from Hays’s 1871 song “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane.” Surviving American sheet music establishes Hays as the composer of that secular source melody. The original song belonged to the commercial minstrel tradition and used racialized dialect and imagery that modern churches should recognize as part of the tune’s historical provenance rather than ignore.

The path from Hays’s song to the present hymn setting is less straightforward. Charles W. Fry adapted the melody for his sacred text, while later gospel collections associated the arrangement with Ira D. Sankey or, incorrectly, with J. R. Murray. Modern hymnals commonly credit Hays as composer and Fry as adapter. Thus Hays supplied the source melody, but he did not compose it specifically for “The Lily of the Valley.”