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Fanny Crosby
My Story, My Song
Huddled in her bunk, heading homeward up the Hudson River from New York City, five-year-old Fanny Crosby was soothed by the sound of the water lapping against the hull. Earlier in the day she and her mother had received a dire report from the eye specialist: there was no hope for recovery. Fanny would remain blind for the rest of her life. Yet she did not despair. As she lay in ever-present darkness, the sound of the water slapping rhythmically against the wood, the waves seemed to call out encouragement to her. “I never lost faith in the great Father above,” she wrote. “I know that the river waves were His, and that I had heard His voice.”1
Most people don’t consider their suffering a gift from God, but Fanny Crosby was an exception. In fact, she repeatedly acknowledged that her blindness was a blessing: “I verily believe it was His intention that I should live my days in physical darkness, so as to be better prepared to sing His praises and incite others to do so.”2
And sing his praises she did. Fanny Crosby wrote more than nine thousand hymns over the course of her ninety-four years, including some, such as “Blessed Assurance” and “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” that are regularly sung in worship services today. She wrote so many hymns that she was forced to use nearly two hundred pseudonyms over the span of her career, for fear that the hymnals would be filled with virtually her name only from front to back.
She also penned more than one thousand poems; published two bestselling autobiographies; worked tirelessly for New York City missions in Hell’s Kitchen, the Bowery, and the Tenderloin; and traveled nationally as a public speaker. It’s clear that Fanny Crosby never let blindness—or any other obstacles, for that matter—stand in the way of fulfilling God’s vision for her life.
“Contented I Will Be”
Frances Jane “Fanny” Crosby was born in 1820 in the village of Brewster, fifty miles north of New York City. When she was six weeks old, she developed inflammation in both eyes, which led to blindness. Her mother, Mercy, and her maternal grandmother raised her. Her father, John Crosby, died before her first birthday.
Determination was a hallmark of Fanny’s personality, even when she was a young child. At age eight, she wrote her first poem:
Oh, what a happy child I am,
Although I cannot see!
I am resolved that in this world
Contented I will be.
How many blessings I enjoy
That other people don’t!
So weep or sigh because I’m blind,
I cannot, nor I won’t!
By age ten Fanny could recite from memory the Pentateuch and the four Gospels, and she desperately hungered for education. She prayed each night for God to give her light, referring not to a cure for her blindness but to her quest for knowledge. “I had long been contented to bear the burden of blindness: but my education—my education—how was I to get it? I felt like I was in danger of growing more and more ignorant every day.”3 Not long after, Fanny’s prayers were answered when she was accepted by the New York Institution for the Blind, where she remained for twenty-three years: twelve as a student and eleven as a teacher of grammar, rhetoric, and history. There she met her husband, fellow student, teacher, and organist Alexander van Alstyne, whom she married in 1858 and who wrote the music to many of her hymns.
The school fueled Fanny’s determination and acknowledged what she’d always suspected: with God’s help, she could overcome any obstacle. “Whatever we determined to do, if within the average power of man or woman, we could, with God’s help, do—the same as if we had the blessings of sight: and at it we went with a will.”4
Old-Fashioned Hymn Composing
From the time she was a young girl, Fanny was moved by the music she heard every Sunday in church. “With the ultra-acute hearing which generally accompanies blindness, I could distinguish every word of the hymns . . . and they were in many cases a refreshment to my young soul. Even in childhood, I began to wonder who made those hymns; and if I could ever make one that people would sing.”5 She published her first hymn, “An Evening Hymn,” in 1843, and shortly after that she set a lofty goal for herself. She aimed to bring one million people to Christ through her hymns, and throughout her life she kept a careful account of those reportedly saved by her lyrics.
Fanny described her writing process as old-fashioned, acknowledging that she began each hymn-composing session with prayer, asking God to provide her with inspiration. She advised aspiring hymn writers not to force the process: “True hymns may be said, in one sense, to make themselves; although they must be given to human instruments through which to work.”6
She often received her lyrics in a flash, which she attributed to divine inspiration. Such was the case with the creation of one of her most famous hymns, “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.” On April 30, 1868, the musician Howard Doane knocked on Fanny’s Manhattan apartment door. “I have exactly forty minutes before I must meet a train for Cincinnati,” he said. “I have a tune for you. See if it says anything to you.”
After Doane hummed the melody, Fanny immediately clapped her hands and exclaimed, “Why, that says, ‘Safe in the arms of Jesus!’” She dashed into her bedroom, kneeled on the floor, and asked God to provide her with the words quickly. Within thirty minutes, she’d composed the poem in her mind and dictated it to Doane, who made it to the station in time to catch his train.7
Many years later, in her autobiography Fanny Crosby’s Story of Ninety-Four Years, she revealed her life’s greatest loss: the death of her infant, Frances. Some biographers suggest that “Safe in the Arms of Jesus” was inspired by her daughter’s death, although Fanny never acknowledged that in her own writing, nor did she ever talk about her daughter. Regardless, the hymn offered comfort and hope to hundreds of grieving mothers. Reverend John Hall of New York City’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church once told Fanny that her hymn had given more “peace and satisfaction to mothers who have lost their children than any other hymn I have ever known.”8
Fanny never learned to write properly, so she composed a hymn entirely in her head and then would “let it lie in the writing-desk of [her] mind” until she was ready to prune and shape it into its final form. She was passionate about what she feared would become “the lost art of recollection” and often urged friends and fans to practice memory exercises. “The books of the mind are just as real and tangible as those of the desk and the library shelves—if we only will use them enough to keep their binding flexible, and their pages free from dust.”9 Finally, she would wait until her husband or a friend was available to transcribe the hymn for her as she recited it, and then the hymn would be set to music by one of the composers with whom she regularly worked. Fanny typically earned one to two dollars per song, with the rights of the song retained by the composer or publisher.
Despite her prolific hymn writing, Fanny most desired to be known as a mission worker, especially in the later years of her life. In 1880, at the age of sixty, she made a commitment to God to serve the poor. Later, in an interview that was published in the March 24, 1908, issue of the New Haven Register, Fanny stated her chief occupation not as hymnist but as mission worker.10 For the last several decades of her life, she lived separately from her husband in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Manhattan so that she could be closer to those she served. “From the time I received my first check for my poems, I made up my mind to open my hand wide to those who needed assistance,” she wrote in her Story of Ninety-Four Years. “During these ninety years I have never served for mere pay.”11
Fanny lived by her word. Not only did she financially support more than a half dozen city missions, she also volunteered almost daily at a number of them and spoke publicly as a passionate advocate for the poor at YMCAs, churches, and prisons. When she died, a provision in her will provided the funds to launch the Fanny Crosby Memorial Home for the Aged in Bridgeport, Connecticut, which operated for more than seventy years before the property was donated to the Bridgeport Rescue Mission.
She was also creatively inspired by her mission work, and many of her hymns were written as a direct response to the people who knew her as “Aunt Fanny” at the inner-city missions. One of her most famous, “Rescue the Perishing,” was written after a speech she gave to blue-collar workers in Cincinnati and later became, as her composer Ira Sankey called it, “a battle-cry for the great army of Christian workers throughout the world.”12
Nothing pleased her more than hearing that one of her hymns was a catalyst for a person’s conversion to faith. “God has given me a wonderful work to do, a work that has brought me untold blessing and great joy,” she wrote. “When word is brought to me, as it is from time to time, of some wandering soul being brought back home through one of my hymns, my heart thrills with joy, and I give thanks to God for giving me a share in the glorious work of saving human souls.”13
Daily Rejoicing
It’s easy for us to conclude that Fanny Crosby was a phenomenally hopeful, optimistic, and faithful person, and much of her own writing supports that claim. However, a closer look at her autobiographies hints that she was not immune to periods of discouragement. It was during these times especially that she looked to God for hope and sustenance. She was as pragmatic about her faith as she was about both her blindness and her gift for poetry and song, and it’s clear that she accepted every facet of her life as a gift from God: “For me, life has been short of many things that some people would probably rather die than be without. That is their misfortune—not mine. It is not the things I’ve missed, or never had, which make me sorrowful. It is the things I have had in full measure in which I rejoice daily.”14
So many of Fanny Crosby’s hymns capture her deep faith and love for God, but the refrain of one of her most famous and familiar hymns, “Blessed Assurance,” may express it best in a few simple words:
This is my story, this is my song,
praising my Savior all the day long.
Fanny Crosby was blessedly assured of Jesus’ love throughout all of her ninety-four years. That unwavering faith is the essence of her story . . . and her songs.15