The Hymnal Companion to the Lutheran Book of Worship quotes the author on how the hymn was written: “The idea of writing the ‘Forgiveness’ hymn came to me some years ago when I was digging up docks in a long-neglected garden. Realizing how these deeply-rooted weeds were choking the life of the flowers in the garden, I came to feel that deeply-rooted resentments in our lives would destroy every Christian virtue and all joy and peace unless, by God’s grace, we learned to forgive.” The hymn was first used in two modern hymnbook in Britain in 1969, then it made its way to America in Lutheran Book of Worship, 1978.

     Rosamond Eleanor Herklots’ British parents were living in Masuri, North India, when she was born June 22, 1905. Back at home in England, she was educated at Leeds Girls’ High School and Leeds University. For a while she was a teacher, then she change to secretarial work for neurologist. She wrote verse from childhood, but as she says, hymns “intended to express in simple words of faith, hope, and dedication of the ordinary Christian” came along later in life. In 1978 she was a secretary in the head office of the Association for Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus in London. She has written about 70 hymns, two of which won places in the final “Telecast of Hymns for Britain” competition.

      DETROIT is one of those tunes sometimes classified in the generic Sacred Harp tradition-religious songs in early America that were based on, or composed in the style of, folk songs brought over from England and Ireland. George Pullen Jackson, noted authority on this songs, says in Spiritual Folk-Songs of Early America that DETROIT is found in at least 10 of these shaped-note songbooks, including the 1820 Supplement to Kentucky Harmony; Virginia Harmony, 1831, and Southern Harmony, 1835, where it was credited to “Bradshaw”; and The Sacred Harp, 1844, edited by B. F. White and E .J. King.

      The tune is similar to that of “The Wife of Usher’s Well,” an English folk song found by Cecil Sharp in the southern Appalachian Mountains. These are several different rhythmical versions of the tune, the one SDAH uses being from Lutheran Book of Worship, 1978, as arranged by Walter L. Pelz (1926- ), a teacher, and choral conductor at Bethany College, Lindsborg, Kansas, since 1969. Notice the different rhythm in the example printed above, taken from an early edition of The Sacred Harp. (The melody is in the third line down.) This hymn should be sung no faster than the run of the eighth notes in the third measure can be sung comfortably.