Year of Hymn Stories: A Primer of Hymnology

Every hymn has a story. Sometimes that story involves a plague, a death in poverty, or a verse scribbled on a tavern napkin. Carl F. Price, one of America's first serious hymnologists, gathered fifty-two of these stories from the Methodist Sunday School Hymnal and arranged them like a year of Sundays: each week its own chapter, its own revelation. Here you will find Charles Wesley's methodical genius alongside Martin Rinkart, who buried his wife and children during the Thirty Years' War before writing one of the church's most beloved thanksgivings. You will meet Isaac Watts, the sickly boy who revolutionized how Protestants sang, and Henry Kirke White, who died at nineteen but left behind music that would endure two centuries. Price organizes these narratives around the Methodist church year: Missionary Sundays, Temperance Sundays, Children's Day, the major feast days. The result is not merely a primer but a window into how a tradition remembers itself through song. For anyone who has ever wondered why that hymn matters, or who wrote it, or what they were thinking when they wrote it, this book answers with the kind of detail that transforms a hymn from performance into prayer.