What a Friend We Have in Jesus Joseph M. Scriven, 1865

Joseph Scriven wrote the words to comfort his mother, Jane, who was grieving in Dublin while he lived in Canada. The Hymnology Archive says he may have written them after his father died in December 1850. A friend of the family later said Scriven gave his mother a handwritten copy around 1855, though the archive thinks that date runs a little early. The first printing anyone can confirm is in Horace L. Hastings' Social Hymns, Original and Selected (Boston, 1865). It carried no author's name and no music. Ira Sankey and P. P. Bliss printed it in Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs in 1875, and early copies credited the Scottish hymn writer Horatius Bonar. Bonar said he had not written it, and Gospel Hymns No. 5 named Scriven in 1887. Sankey wrote in his 1906 memoir that he found the hymn in a pamphlet from Richmond, Virginia. The tune CONVERSE comes from Charles C. Converse, a lawyer and composer. He published it under the pen name Karl Reden in Silver Wings (Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1870). Hymnary dates the tune 1868. A popular story says Converse wrote it in Erie, Pennsylvania, but he lived in New York in 1870 and moved to Erie in 1875. Scriven spent most of his adult life in Ontario, where he taught school and tutored. He died in 1886.