Modern Alma the Younger Ganster Who Wrote “Come, Thou Fount”

Did you know that the author of the Hymn “Come, Thou Found of Every Blessing” was a gangster? His name was Robert Robison, born in Norfolk, England in 1735.. He was kind of like a more modern Alma the Younger.

Like Alma and his cronies, the 4 princes of Zarahemla (the sons of Mosiah), Robert was a teenage hellion.

He was apparently really smart and full of conviction as a boy. But when his father died, Robert took a rebellious turn.

His mom knew she needed to do something to give him some discipline. So, she sent him off to London at the age of 14 to apprentice as a barber.

Unfortunately, he got involved in a gang almost right away, and his rebelliousness increased.

When he was 17, he and his gang buddies went to a Methodist revival to heckle the speakers. But when he heard one preacher, the message about the Lord’s wrath toward sinners really shook him.

Even though he started to feel like it was time to clean up his life, it wasn’t until 3 years later that Robert finally committed to living a good Christian life. He described this experience as finding “full and free forgiveness through the precious blood of Jesus Christ.”

He decided he wanted to become a preacher. Even though he didn’t have much formal education, he loved to learn, and he hit the books hard. Pretty soon he got a lot of attention as a gifted scholar.

He started out as a Methodist preacher. Yet later, he became a Baptist minister at the Stone Yard Baptist Church in Cambridge, England. He was the pastor there for over 30 years, until his death in 1790.

A Hymn To Celebrate the 3rd Year Anniversary of His Conversion

On the 3rd anniversary of Robert Robison’s conversion, he gave a sermon about the Day of Pentecost… the day when the Apostles of Christ converted thousands of people after the mighty rushing winds… a big demonstration of God’s power to the people of the ancient church.

To accompany his sermon, Robert wrote the lyrics to “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” It was basically a self-conversion-portrait.

You can see some references to the Day of Pentecost in verse 1… “sung by flaming tongues above”... depicting the flaming tongues of angels. Also, the “stream of mercy, never ceasing”... like the huge pourings out of the spirit on that remarkable day.

The word “Ebenezer” in verse 2 is not a reference to Ebenezer Scrooge from Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” as I thought it was as a kid.

Rather, it’s a direct reference to 1 Samuel 7:12. In this passage, the prophet Samuel sets up a stone as a memorial after a victory and names it Ebenezer, meaning "stone of help," to commemorate God's divine assistance. Actually, doesn’t that give some interesting insight into who Ebenezer Scrooge was in “A Christmas Carol”? At the start, you wouldn’t think of Scrooge as a “stone of help.” But after his conversion, he certainly turned into one. Pretty cool how just a character’s name can depict their whole journey.

Anyway, here are the full lyrics of this hymn:

Come, Thou Fount of ev’ry blessing;
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace.
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount; I’m fixed upon it:
Mount of Thy redeeming love.

Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Hither by Thy help I’m come.
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wand’ring from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood.

Oh, to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wand’ring heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love.
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it;
Seal it for Thy courts above.

Beautiful, right? But, did you know that there's a missing verse?

The Missing Verse About the Second Coming

I don’t know why, but the final verse of Robison’s original text is often left out of Christian hymnals, including our own. It’s too bad. It’s really beautiful. It really shows the full journey of conversion, culminating in a huge climax and the ultimate goal of seeing the Savior.

O that Day when freed from sinning,
I shall see thy lovely Face;
Clothed then in blood-washed Linnen
How I’ll sing thy sovereign grace;
Come, my Lord, no longer tarry,
Take my ransom’d Soul away;
Send thine Angels now to carry
Me to realms of endless Day.

How His Hymn Healed His Faith Crisis

I often chat with my students about how the music we write to bring others to Christ is often the very thing that helps us in moments of crisis.

The same is true of the beautiful words Robert Robison wrote. They helped him through a faith crisis of his own.

He was traveling in a stagecoach seated next to a young woman who was reading from and humming a hymn tune.

She had no idea who she was sitting next to. But she asked him what he thought of the hymn she’d been humming.

Of course, he recognized it as the hymn he’d written many years before, that was later set to music.

He tried to dodge the question, not feeling much faith at the time. But she persisted and shared the lyrics with him.

As she read the line, "Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, Prone to leave the God I love," Robinson was overcome with emotion. With tears in his eyes, he confessed, "Madam, I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many years ago, and I would give a thousand worlds, if I had them, to enjoy the feelings I had then."

Apparently, this experience was what turned him around and brought him back to his full faith.

It’s pretty magical how the Lord does this sometimes. Our own creations can be the answer to our prayers.

This Hymn in LDS History

When Emma Smith put together the first LDS Hymnal (which was only texts without any music notation), she included this hymn. And it stayed in our hymnals until the 1985 edition. I once heard Michael Moody, the head of the 1985 hymnbook committee, say that he would go down in history as the man who removed “Come, Thou Found of Every Blessing” from the hymnal.

The official reason given by the hymnbook committee was that the hymn was not widely known or frequently sung by Church members at the time.

Some have also suggested that a desire to include more uniquely Latter-day Saint hymns and fewer of a "Protestant-type" may have also played a role in the decision.

But Mack Wilberg’s arrangement became a favorite of many Latter-day Saints, bringing it to wide popularity in the church.

In 2018 when the church announced the new hymnal and asked for suggestion, 45,000 suggestions were submitted. And the most often requested hymn was “Come, Thou Found of Every Blessing.”

So, now we have it back.

Dr. Doug’s Opinion of This Hymn

I’m glad it’s back. It’s a favorite. And even though it’s more of a “song” than a traditional hymn, this hymn-like version will work well on the organ and in the voices of our congregations.

My favorite part is the last line of the 3rd verse. I hear Elder Maxwell when I read this line. He quoted it in a favorite General Conference. It’s such a wonderful plea to the Lord.

“Here’s my heart, O take and seal it; seal it for Thy courts above.”

So, I’m very glad they’ve included this hymn in the new hymnal. It’s a winner.

If you’d like to download my complete harmonic analysis of this hymn, you can do so right here:

Now, I’d like to share 5 music-writing techniques from “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” Each of these techniques can be used in your music to help make Sacrament Meeting have a greater, stronger, more impactful spirit.

Technique #1: How to Make the Tonic Chord More Interesting

In hymns like this, there's not a lot of wild harmonies. It's pretty much simple, mostly diatonic harmonies. Because of this simplicity, sometimes we can run into problems. One of these problems is the possibility of boring or bland chords.

Something that I love to do when things get bland or boring (and I'm glad to see it's been done in this arrangement) is to use inversions. This simple chord re-voicing can quickly make basic chords more interesting.

As you can see in the sheet music below, we're in D Major. We start with the "one" chord, we go to the five chord, we come back to the "one" chord on “Fount of.” Two normal "one" chords. But then on “every,” we get two more "one" chords, but look at the change!

First, on the “ev-” of “every,” we get a root position chord. Then we get this beautifully stretched-out first inversion chord of the "one" chord with the F-sharp in the bass.

That makes the "one" chord so much more interesting instead of just pounding the same chord over and over again.

Then it happens again in the very next measure on “Tune my heart.” Same technique. We take a root position "one" chord to a first inversion "one" chord. This time it's the higher F# instead of the lower F#, but the same principle applies.

So whenever you're in a spot where you think, “Hmm, is my harmony too monotonous?” this is the first thing I always try. I ask myself if I can add an inversion of that chord with a different note in the bass to make it more interesting. Remember, if your harmony is sounding a little monotonous… but you don’t want to go wild and add a bunch of crazy chords… try adding some simple inversions of that chord.

Technique #2: Eternal Voice-Leading Principal that Makes Your Writing Rich and Delicious

First of all, what is voice leading? Voice leading is the smooth horizontal connection from chord to chord in music. When we're writing music, we need to think vertically. But we also need to think horizontally.

A common problem I see with my students is only thinking vertically. No matter what instrument you're writing on—whether you write for guitar and voice as a singer-songwriter, or whether you're writing at the piano, or you write choral music or hymns or any style of writing—it's important to think about both the harmony (the chord vertically). Yet, it’s just as important (or maybe more, in my mind) to also think carefully about how one chord connects to the next in each voice. That's what voice leading is.

So, the eternal voice leading principle I want to point out that's used so well at the beginning of this hymn is that after we take a large leap in one voice, it's best to step in the opposite direction.

As I've highlighted in blue in the image above, the bass line does just that. We get these three D’s in a row in that first full measure. Then we get a very big leap of a sixth, down to the F-sharp.

The general voice-leading rule at practice here comes from old-school counterpoint rules (which is like the principles of the gospel of voice leading, so to speak). This rule is that, the bigger the leap you take in a voice, the more you should step in the opposite direction afterwards.

So, tacking on to technique number one, the bass line in blue above, where we go from root position to first inversion to make it more interesting, was caused by a big leap. The arranger of this hymn—I don't know who it is, but they did a great job—leaped down to that F-sharp. As this is a pretty big leap, they correctly stepped in the opposite direction.

This is a voice-leading principle you can count on. So remember, the bigger the leap you take, the more you want to step in the opposite direction.

Technique #3: Contrary Motion Cadences

Let's break that down a little bit. First of all, what's a cadence?

A cadence is musical punctuation. You know, at the end of every sentence when you're writing an email or a letter, you need some punctuation: a period or an exclamation point. Sometimes you need a comma. Sometimes you need a semicolon.

Well, we also have musical punctuation. It’s a small group of chords that alert the listener that this is the end of the phrase. There are several different types of cadences. But what matters here is how the chords at the cadence connect.

At the end of the first phrase in this hymn, we have a pretty standard cadence where the V chord resolves to the "one" chord. We're going to look at this opening cadence at the end of the first line. I mentioned that this is a contrary motion cadence.

What do I mean by contrary motion? Have a look at the soprano line and the bass line here, marked in blue.

As shown in the image, the soprano goes F#-E-D while the bass line goes B-C#-D. They end on an octave together, but they get there from opposite directions: the bass going up, the soprano coming down. This is “contrary” motion between these two voices.

In music, there are several types of motion. There's the contrary motion we have here. We have what's called similar motion, where both voices are moving in the same direction. Sometimes similar motion turns into what we call parallel motion if the voices are moving in the same direction by the same interval, and that's the kind of motion that can sometimes get you into trouble. The fourth type is something called oblique motion, which is where one voice stays the same (repeats the notes) while the other voice moves.

The two safest types of motion are contrary motion and oblique motion. They help you avoid mistakes and errors that kind of destroy the resonance of your music. So you want to use contrary motion and oblique motion as much as you can without destroying the flavor of the music you're going for.

In this particular case, the phrase above ends with a nice, authentic cadence (meaning we're ending with the five chord going to the "one" chord), but we do so with this nice bass motion coming up by step while the upper voice is coming down by step. This is an incredibly smooth, nice, “leading us home” kind of voice-leading to make our cadence very pleasing.

Technique #4: Using the Melodic Motive in the Bass Line

When we get down to the third line of this hymn, on the words “Teach me some melodious sonnet,” the bass line here on this line changes. The way this hymn is structured is the melody is the same on lines one and two, and if I remember correctly, almost the same if not identical on line four.

But the third line is the contrasting line. So in the spirit of something contrasting, not only does the melody change, but so does the bass line.

What I love about this opening of the third line is that the three opening notes in the bass line are the three opening notes of the melody from the beginning of the hymn. Have a look:

As you can see above, while the soprano is going “Teach me some,” the bass is playing the opening of the main melody, “Come Thou Fount”. We get the melody motive, the opening three-note motive, in the bass line.

This is so great! It's kind of a subliminal technique; we don't always pick up on this at a first listen. Your congregation will probably never notice that kind of thing. But what it does is it gives you a beautiful, cohesive connection between different voices of your music. This is a beautiful counterpoint technique... taking melodic motives from the melody and inserting them into other voices, like the bass here, to create a really cohesive structure. This is a great technique.

Technique #5: Warm Fuzzy Chord Substitution

What do I mean by warm fuzzy? You know that feeling you get when a certain chord gives you that feeling? It's that delicious, “ooh” feeling when you hear a really good bit of music. That's what I mean here.

The arrangement of this hymn in the new hymnal is a little bit different than the one that was in the old orange hymnal before the 1985 hymnal. There are several versions of this hymn in many different hymnals, and at this particular point, again on the third line of this hymn, what we hear in many other versions is on beat two of this measure, where the blue highlight is on “melodious,” we often hear a "three" chord there.

But instead, this arranger did not use the "three" chord. They moved one note to make this juicy change. Instead of the tenor singing a C#, which would be parallel fifths anyway (we'll talk more about parallel fifths another time), it's still a "one" chord, but the melody note does not fit the normal one chord. There are no C#s in a D major chord, unless you're counting the seventh. So he takes the one chord on “some” and then makes “melodious” start on a "one-major-7" chord, or a first inversion of a "one-major-7" chord.

It creates this beautiful, warm fuzzy feeling. Try playing it. You’ll hear the difference between the "three" chord and this "one-major-7" chord in first inversion. I wrote out the "three" chord for you in red in the image above. The version with the "three" chord has a bit of a melancholy feel.

Now, try the "one-major-7"... the written chord… it has that tang on it because of the interval of the major 7th between the tenor and the soprano. That stepping down to that C# while the bass goes up to first inversion to go from one to "one-major-7" in first inversion is so nice. It also prepares the tenors beautifully for the four chord, so we don't have any illegal parallels, which can happen very easily when you have two root position chords next to each other and the bass is stepping.

That's like the number one place where people mess up and do illegal parallels, which destroy the resonance of your music. If the tenor had been a C#, that would have happened. But because it's a D, it doesn't happen. They avoided the resonance-sapping parallel fifths and instead, we fill it with extra resonance with a "one-major-7" chord with a major seventh on it.

Play it again and just listen one more time, it sounds so nice! Oh, love it. Great technique: warm fuzzy chord substitution.

Do You Want To Learn More Cool Chord Tricks?

If you’ve enjoyed learning these techniques, you might love my Free Crash Course.

It’s 7 free lessons, each including a powerful harmony technique. With these 7 simple techniques, you can quickly make any hymn sound new, fresh, and more interesting. With these new sounds, you can enjoy playing the hymns in a new way at home, or even give your congregation a fun experience in the last verse of a congregational hymn.

If you’d like to grab these 7 free lessons in the Crash Course, just enter your info here:

Stay tuned for more hymn reviews. And let me know your thoughts below.

In the next one, we're going to look at Lanice Johnson's song, “When the Savior Comes Again.”

See you next time!

Doug