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In what the database calls CLUW2001, Come, Let Us Worship, the bilingual Korean-English United Methodist hymnal, hymn 391 "I'm Pressing on the Upward" has a fifth stanza that I can find nowhere else. In English, it goes thusly:
My Lord I'll follow, till I stand
erect upon that lofty land;
and, blest forever, sing his grace,
who led and set me in this place.
The hymnal provides no special information about the origins of this stanza; the whole five-stanza work is ascribed to Johnson Oatman, Jr., and the Korean translation is ascribed to "The United Methodist Korean Hymnal Committee". So where did the fifth stanza come from? Is it truly an original part of Oatman's hymn, for reasons unknown omitted by most hymnal editors? Or is it a free-floating stanza from somewhere else that has glommed onto this hymn much as "When we've been there ten thousand years" has attached itself to "Amazing Grace"? Or is it an English rendering of a Korean original (by whom?)? Or what?
Comments
Higher Ground
The Oatman/Gabriel song "Higher Ground" was first published in Songs of Love and Praise, No. 5 (1898), hymn no. 89. It has four stanzas, not including the one you listed above. That answers part of your question. That does not exclude the possibility that Oatman added another later. I've sung it many times in my life and it's certainly not in any print I've ever seen. Maybe it is adapted from a Korean version.
Thanks, Chris
I assume when you say you've sung "it" many times you're referring to the four-verse original, not the fifth verse given above and in CLUW2001.
Sometimes I wish more hymnal editorial committees had a hymnologist or hymn historian on staff. A post factum hymnal companion or handbook will usually address my concerns and questions, but as far as I know there is no such volume for CLUW2001.
The other song of immediate interest to me in that hymnal is "Jesus shed his blood for me", set to NEAR THE CROSS (Doane), which we will be singing (in English) at our Nov. 20 hymn-sing "Hark! the sound of jubilee". The hymnal says it is by Fanny Crosby, but I can't find any corroborating evidence, and other information describes it as the first Christian hymn written indigenously in Korean by a Korean (the name of the author slips my mind). It does not appear to be the W C Martin piece listed under that first line in the Hymnary.org database, though in the absence of a complete text I can't be 100% sure. At any rate the refrain is completely different.