The first part of this hymn was the final stanza of Charles Wesley’s “Jesus, Great Shepherd of the Sheep.” As early as 1842 it had been changed to the first stanza and the refrain added. It was in eight different collections, with largely original stanzas, in 1842 and 1843. All but two of these were Millerite Adventist collections, so we can conclude that the hymn is an anonymous product of that movement that swept the northeastern United States. In one book, the Mozart Collection of Sacred Music, 1846, the text is attributed to J. N. Moffett, who is otherwise unknown.

This hymn was popular in the meetings held by Millerite preachers in the middle of the nineteenth century. It appeared in Millennial Harp, or Second Advent Hymns; Designed for Meetings on the Second Coming of Christ, by Joshua V. Himes, Boston, 1843 (see reproduction on page 449). Notice the wide range, an octave and a fourth, one melody note of which was lowered a third in the second full measure and again in the refrain, probably by F. E. Belden (see Biographies). He included it in Hymns and Tunes, 1886, in a section titled “Miscellaneous-Old Melodies.” SDAH lowered the key from G. down to F.

Ellen Jane Lorenz, in her Glory, Hallelujah! The Story of the Camp Meeting Spiritual, 1978, did a study of the folk hymns found in nineteenth-century American hymnals, especially the rousing spiritual songs and choruses used in the Northern camp meetings. She found this one 60 times, and said that the chorus words, “O Canaan, bright Canaan,” seldom vary, except for the alternate sweet Canaan, but a great number of different “mother hymns” are used. She defined a mother hymn as “the words of a ‘standard’ hymn in part or whole (usually set to a folk-hymn tune), to which has been attached a camp meeting chorus.”

In his Negro Slave Songs in the United States, Miles Mark Fisher quotes Frederick Douglass about the double meaning this chorus had for the slaves: “We were at times remarkably buoyant, singing hymns, and making joyous exclamations, almost as triumphant in their tone as if we had reached a land of freedom and safety. A keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of ‘O Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan,’ something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach the North, and the North was our Canaan.”

The arrangement by Melvin West (1930-; see Biographies) is based on the version found in Hymns and Tunes, 1886.

(See music score in the SDAH Companion)

📖 Reference: Companion to the Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal by Wayne Hooper and Edward E. White. Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1988.