Shall We Gather at the River

Robert Lowry wrote both the words and the tune in the summer of 1864, in Brooklyn, where he was pastor of the Hanson Place Baptist Church. He said afterward that he had been wondering why hymn writers said so much about the river of death and so little about the pure water of life described at the end of Revelation, clear as crystal and flowing from the throne of God. He turned that into a question, shall we gather at the river, and then answered his own question in the chorus. It was first printed the following year in a collection called Happy Voices, under the title Beautiful River. The tune is named HANSON PLACE after his church.

Lowry was a Baptist minister and a professor of literature who wrote hymns in his spare time and produced a startling number of the ones that stuck. Nothing But the Blood, Christ Arose and the tune everybody sings How Can I Keep from Singing to are all his. By his own account he would rather have preached a sermon than written a hymn, and it faintly put him out that the hymns were what people wanted from him.

The hymn traveled a long way out of church, and most of why an American audience hears it as frontier music is one director. It was among John Ford's favorite hymns and he put it in seven of his films, from Stagecoach in 1939, where it plays under a woman being run out of town by the ladies of the Law and Order League, through My Darling Clementine and Wagon Master to The Searchers, which uses it twice. Charles Ives set it, and Aaron Copland put an arrangement called At the River into his Old American Songs in 1952. Those arrangements are pieces of writing in their own right and none of them is a source for anything here. Lowry's 1864 melody has been public domain for a very long time, and it is what this page carries.

The shape is why a room can sing it. The verse and the chorus are eight bars each, the phrases are two bars long, and each phrase ends on a note held for two beats or four, which gives everybody time to catch up and breathe. Three chords, and the only one that is not in the verse is the G that opens both halves of the chorus, which is the lift a congregation hears the moment the chorus arrives.

On a mandolin it stays inside one octave, from the open D course up to the d at the fifth fret of the A course, and the hand never has to move. Every phrase parks on a long note while the band keeps going underneath, and there are ten of those long notes in sixteen bars, so this is where the tremolo gets its practice. Get the tremolo started cleanly on each one, hold it steady, and stop it before the two quick notes that lead into the next phrase. The chorus's third bar is the one exception, eight even eighths rocking between G and F sharp, and it wants a plain down up all the way through.