Songs of Grace and Glory

Songs of Grace and Glory is so valuable and also extremely obscure today. Few people early in the 21st century have ever heard of this hymnbook, and very few if any today realize the enormous, costly effort and time that Charles Busbridge Snepp and Frances Ridley Havergal gave to complete this collection of hymns. Here was true diligence, and much thought, labor, sacrifice in time and effort, a labor of love. Extremely few people today realize the remarkably fine gifts Frances Ridley Havergal had in music. As a performer and as a composer she had a rare level of gifts, and she was very diligent with her gifts. Her father, Rev. William Henry Havergal, was the foremost church musician and composer of sacred music in England in his generation, and he was a leading advocate for reform in the practice and taste of church music. Rev. Charles Busbridge Snepp, an Anglican pastor, was a hymnologist with an important collection of hymnbooks, a deep interest in hymns, and a desire to bring out a new, comprehensive hymnal. Snepp had written to William Henry about this project, and on the morning of W. H. H.'s last conscious day, he composed a score for a hymn in Snepp's new project, Songs of Grace and Glory. The next day, April 17, 1870, Easter, he was seized with apoplexy and never regained consciousness, dying on April 19. Rev. Snepp after that wrote to his daughter, F. R. H., and later they concluded that she would edit the music for the new hymnal. Though so extremely obscure today, Songs of Grace and Glory is a true treasure of worship in song, a gold mine strongly worthy to be republished today, studied by church musicians, and used in worship in our day. Snepp was the architect and leader of the work and the editor of the texts, and F. R. H. prepared and edited all of the music (only six or eight scores remained to be finished when she died so unexpectedly early at forty-two and a half). Beyond the labor-with great skill-in preparing all of the music scores and texts for 1,100 hymns, Frances also wrote a number of the hymns newly, specifically for this book, and also composed a number of hymn scores for S. G. G. This is an enormous and enormously impressive body of work. Frances directly prepared for press the scores of 1,100 hymns, and after she thought that her work was completed on this, she learned that the papers and plates for the Appendix at the printer had been lost in a devastating fire, so that she would need to do all of the work on the Appendix again. In the British Library, a copy of Songs of Grace and Glory is dated 1883 with "Three Hundred and Thirteenth Thousand" on the title page. The work began with Havergal's Psalmody and Century of Chants, a republication of three of William Henry's earlier volumes of hymn scores, Old Church Psalmody (1847), A Hundred Psalm and Hymn Tunes (1859), and A Century of Chants (1870), with other previously unpublished scores by W. H. H. and also a few scores composed by Frances, all edited by F. R. H. and published by Robert Cocks & Co., London, 1871. Cocks published a second and a third edition (the third edition in 1872). James Nisbet & Co. published the fourth edition in 1877. Havergal's Psalmody and Century of Chants was a "Companion Volume to Songs of Grace and Glory." The music in H. P. C. C. was the music for the hymns in Songs of Grace and Glory. S. G. G. was published in a number of editions.