O Ye Mountains High
34

Text: Charles W. Penrose (1832–1925; LDS)
Music: H. S. Thompson (born ca. 1824)
Tune name: LILY DALE

A Latter- day Saint who lives in Hong Kong or Nebraska or Haiti probably will not think of the snow- capped mountains of Utah as “my own mountain home.” But in fact, this hymn was written by a man who had seen Utah only in his imagination. And every member of the Church can respond to this hymn in its figurative meaning: the restored gospel grants to its followers a life of freedom, purity, and worship, far above the cares and errors of the world.

In Stories of Latter- day Saint Hymns, George D. Pyper quoted these words from Charles W. Penrose about the writing of the text of this hymn:

“‘O Ye Mountains High’ was written somewhere along about 1854, published about 1856. I was walking on a dusty road in Essex [England]. My toes were blistered and my heels, too. I had been promised that if I would stay in the mission field another year I should be released. That was the cry every year: ‘Brother Penrose, if you will stay and labor another year, we will see that you are released to go to Zion.’ But it kept up for over ten years. Of course I had read about Zion and heard about the streets of Salt Lake City, with the clear streams of water on each side of the street, with shade trees, and so on. I could see it in my mind’s eye, and so I composed that song as I was walking along the road, and set it to a tune— the Scotch ditty, ‘O Minnie, O Minnie, Come o’er the Lea.” . . . In Essex, we held a cottage meeting, and in that meeting I sang it for the first time it was ever sung. Of course the words were adapted to a person who had never been to Zion then, but it was afterwards changed in a very slight respect or two, to fit people who had gathered with the Saints” (15).

George D. Pyper commented further in his own words: “As the clouds of prejudice against the Mormon people disappeared and misunderstandings were cleared up it occurred to many of our own people that two lines in the third and fourth stanzas should be revised. They were, respectively— ‘On the necks of thy foes, thou shalt tread,’ and ‘The Gentiles shall bow ‘neath Thy rod’” (17). As a look at the 1950 and 1985 hymnals will show, this wish was carried out: those lines have become “Without fear of thy foes thou shalt tread” and “Thy land shall be freedom’s abode.”

The early Saints were always receptive to an engaging tune, whatever its source, and the popular song “Lily Dale” provided the melody to which we have sung these words for many decades. “Lily Dale,” with words and music by H. S. Thompson, tells of a dying maiden who wishes to be buried “where the wild flowers grow.” Our chorus of “O Zion! dear Zion! land of the free” was originally “Oh, Lily, sweet Lily, dear Lily Dale.” This tune was incorporated into the Oscar- winning musical score for the 1939 John Ford classic Stagecoach, a film set in the American West of the later nineteenth century.

The “Lily Dale” tune was originally published in 1852, and the hymn text was first published in the Millennial Star in 1856. The matching of hymn text and tune appeared for the first time in the Tune Book for the Primary Association (1880).