Ottilie Stafford professor of English at Atlantic Union College, South Lancaster, Massachusettes, was a member of the SDAH Committee. Born February 12, 1921, in Middletown, New York, the only child in a family of denominational workers, she has been surrounded all her life with the sounds, discussions, and friendships of the church family. Very early in life she started loving and studying music. She earned a B.A. at Atlantic Union College and an M.A. and Ph.D. at Boston University. For a period of time just after leaving college, she was a music teacher. A part of her work in music was under the tutelage of Astrid King, whose interest in church music opened Stafford’s eyes to the concerns of hymnology. Although her graduate work and professional career have been in English, she has retained her interest in church music- as she says, “Where better to combine an interest in poetry and an interest in music than in the great music of the church?” Stafford gives us these words about how this text was written:

“One day during the committee’s meetings, Melvin West [chairman of the tunes subcommittee] asked me to listen to a hymn tune that he had composed for another purpose, but would like to have words written for. I liked the stately and quite music, and an idea that had been half formed in the back of my head began to take shape. He wanted a Sabbath hymn that began with the first Sabbath, reflected on our present experience, and looked forward to the renewed worship, with the Creator of the Sabbath, in a restored world. So I went home and worked on it, and out of this came the hymn as it now appears in the hymnal. One thing that struck me as I worked was the difficult nature of the writing words for hymn tunes, in which the inflections of the words needed to fit the inflections of the music. I finished with a new respect for the great hymn writers!”

SDAH 615, “Rise Up, o church of God!” is a hymn that Stafford revised for this hymnal, and SDAH 471, “Grant Us Your Peace,” is her translation.

WALLOWA was composed by Melvin West (1930- ; see Biographies) in the 1960s while he was chairman of the Music Department at Walla Walla College, College Place, Washington. He wrote it as a setting for a new college hymn, but as it turned out, the school decided to keep its old traditional song. The tune lay dormant until in the hymnal committee meeting he asked Ottilie Stafford (they had known each other and worked together years earlier at Atlantic Union College) if she would like to create a hymn text on the subject of the Sabbath to go with his tune. The tune name comes from the Wallowas, mountain in the northeast corner of Oregon where, West says, his family “spent undoubtedly the happiest Sabbaths of our lives!”

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