Songs I Love to Sing: The Billy Graham Crusades and the Shaping of Modern Worship

By Edith L. Blumhofer and Fernando Ortega

Learn the surprising history shared by some of today’s most popular hymns. 
  
How did “How Great Thou Art,” an obscure Swedish hymn, get covered by Elvis? How did “Just as I Am” save Johnny Cash? How did dc Talk sanctify ’90s pop rock?  
 
In short: the Billy Graham crusades. 
 
Music animated these evangelistic extravaganzas, all of it carefully orchestrated by the “chord of three”: celebrated preacher Billy Graham, Gospel Music Hall of Fame baritone George Beverly Shea, and choral conductor and emcee Clifford Barrows. And the crusades went on to change the larger face of American music, influencing iconic popular artists in the second half of the twentieth century. The crusade songbook also took root in churches, its use spreading beyond evangelical soil into mainline Protestant and Catholic congregations. 
 
In Songs I Love to Sing, Edith L. Blumhofer narrates the “biographies” of some of the most beloved songs in modern hymnody with verve and affection. Move beyond mere nostalgia. Discover the fascinating stories behind the soundtrack of American Christianity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Aug 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781467467582

Edith L. Blumhofer

 Edith L. Blumhofer (1950–2020) was professor of history and former director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

Book preview

1

A SHARED PURPOSE

I am resolved no longer to linger

Charmed by the world’s delight;

Things that are higher, things that are nobler,

These have allured my sight.

—I Am Resolved,

Palmer Hartsough, 1896

The story of the music of the Billy Graham crusades is a long, multilayered, and evolving tale. But ultimately, its essence centered upon a three-man team—William Franklin Billy Graham Jr., George Beverly Shea, Clifford Burton Barrows. They came from three small Christian communions—Associate Reformed Presbyterian, Wesleyan Methodist, independent Baptist. They represented three North American regions: North Carolina, Ontario (Canada), central California. They shared common roots in small-town, semirural childhoods and solid, traditional Protestant homes. Each of them had an early sense of calling to ministry. Each man resolved on his life’s purpose long before they met, and so it is helpful to trace their separate paths before beginning their shared story. Shea was the first, by nearly a decade, to achieve success in the public eye and was the eldest—nine years Graham’s senior and some fourteen years older than Barrows—and so we begin telling the story of the Graham crusades’ music with him.

George Beverly Shea (1909–2013)

George Beverly Shea was the son of pioneer Canadian Wesleyan Methodist pastor Adam Shea and his wife, Maude Whitney. Shea’s mother descended from United Empire Loyalists who had fled the American colonies during the Revolution. Her ancestors were nonetheless among the first Canadians to embrace the teachings of American Methodist circuit riders who crossed from New York into rural Ontario to evangelize pioneer settlements. Shea’s father hailed from Irish immigrant stock that had arrived in Canada in the early 1800s. Adam Shea was converted in a rural revival under the preaching of female Holiness evangelists. He quickly began preaching in logging camps, was discovered by the American Wesleyan Church, and subsequently tagged by the Wesleyans to shepherd their expansion into Canada. By all accounts, Shea was a remarkable man whose abundant common sense, deep spiritual hunger, and willingness to learn from others made him succeed against the odds.

Their son George Beverly Shea began life on a blustery Monday, February 1, 1909, in Winchester, a thriving farming hub just off the main road linking Canada’s capital, Ottawa, and the St. Lawrence River to the south. The Shea family already included two daughters, Pauline (1902) and Mary Evangeline (1906), and one son, John Whitney (1904). Adam and Maude Shea named their second son for towering figures in their lives—his maternal grandfather, George Whitney, and the popular contemporary Methodist Holiness preacher from Mississippi, Beverly Carradine (grandfather and great-grandfather of the actors John Carradine and David, Keith, and Robert Carradine). The Sheas called their new thirteen-pound arrival by his middle name, Beverly. Four siblings would follow his birth over the next