Softly and Tenderly

Will Lamartine Thompson wrote the words and the music, and published the hymn in 1880 through his own firm, Will L. Thompson and Company, in a collection called Sparkling Gems. He was from East Liverpool, Ohio, and after a commercial publisher turned down his early songs he started his own business to print them, then a store to sell pianos, organs and sheet music. The tune is called THOMPSON in the hymnals, after him.

It became one of the best known gospel songs in America. Hymnary.org counts it in more than eight hundred hymnals. The Cyber Hymnal tells a story of Thompson visiting Dwight L. Moody on his deathbed, where the evangelist told him he would rather have written this hymn than anything he had done in his life. It was sung at the memorial service for Martin Luther King Jr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on 8 April 1968, and it runs through the 1985 film The Trip to Bountiful.

It is written in 6/8, two slow beats to a bar, which gives it the rocking gait that makes it sound like a call rather than a march. The verse is two lines that start the same way and end differently. The refrain climbs, and its fourth bar is the moment the whole hymn leans on: three held notes stepping down, d, c sharp, c natural, where a congregation slows and waits for the organist.

On a mandolin in G the melody stays in first position between the open D course and the fifth fret of the A course. The notes are easy. The two accidentals in the refrain are the part to practice: the c sharp at the fourth fret of the A course and then the c natural at the third, one fret apart, so the same finger slides back one fret. Pick 6/8 the way the jigs on this shelf are picked, down, up, down, down, up, down, and let the long notes in the verse ring for their full length.