What a Friend We Have in Jesus

Joseph Scriven wrote the words in 1855 as a poem to comfort his mother, who was in Ireland while he was in Canada. It went out anonymously, and by the Cyber Hymnal's account Scriven did not get full credit for almost thirty years. Charles Crozat Converse wrote the tune in 1868. He lived for many years in Erie, Pennsylvania, and the tune is often called ERIE after the town. It was first printed in 1870, in his collection Silver Wings, under the pen name Karl Reden, and hymnals file it as CONVERSE and FRIENDSHIP too.

The hymn has been sung and recorded across a remarkable range of music. Washington Phillips recorded it as Jesus Is My Friend in 1928, and the Stanley Brothers, Reno and Smiley and Lester Flatt all put it on bluegrass records, along with Aretha Franklin, Mahalia Jackson and Tennessee Ernie Ford. In the First World War the tune carried other words, When This Bloody War Is Over. The Handbook to the Lutheran Hymnal of 1941 noted that the hymn had been criticized as sentimental gospel and that its popularity held anyway.

The verse is sixteen bars in four lines, and three of them open the same way, a long note on the fifth and a quick run down to the tonic. The second and fourth lines are the same line note for note. The third is the one that climbs: it starts low on A, touches the G sharp the hymnals all write on "what" in "O what peace", and reaches the high e before it falls back to wait on A.

On a mandolin in G the tune runs from the open D course to the open E course and never leaves first position. Every line ends on a whole note, and those four long notes are the tremolo practice here: start the tremolo cleanly on the note, keep the pick moving evenly through all four beats, and stop it in time to pick the dotted quarter that opens the next line. The halves on "Je-sus" and "for-feit" can take it too once the whole notes are steady.