| "Jesus Loves Me" | |
| Written by | Anna B. Warner |
|---|---|
| Published | 1860 |
| Language | English |
| Form | Christian hymn |
Jesus Loves Me is a Christian hymn set to words by Anna Bartlett Warner.[1] The lyrics first appeared as a poem in the context of a novel called Say and Seal, written by Susan Warner and published in 1860. The tune was added in 1862 by William Batchelder Bradbury who found the text of "Jesus Loves Me" in this book, in which the words were spoken as a comforting poem to a dying child. Along with his tune, Bradbury added his own chorus "Yes, Jesus loves me, Yes, Jesus Loves me..." After publication the song became one of the most popular Christian hymns in churches around the world.
Different verses, other than the first, often are substituted. The verse about illness is usually omitted, to make the hymn less disturbing to children. The United Church of Canada hymnal attributes the second and fourth verse, and the last two lines of the final verse, to David Rutherford McGuire. Attribution of the third verse is unknown. An external link at the end of this article points to the original version.
Big text==Lyrics==
John M. Frame's "The Doctrine of the Word of God" (2010; p. viii) cites a version with four verses: the above 1 and 5; followed by the following two verses (he attributes all of them to Anna B. Warner):
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Three verses appear along with the first verse in the Evangelical Lutheran Hymnary, the hymnal of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod. These four verses are the only verses of the hymn in this hymnal.
Versions have been recorded by contemporary artists such as Whitney Houston, cocorosie, Destiny's Child, Anita Bryant, Kenny Loggins, Bobby Womack, Sting, Dolly Parton, Javier Bardem, The Coen Brothers, Jimmy Carter, Aretha Franklin, Tim Curry, Danity Kane, William Sledd, Cher, Christie Brinkley, DMX, Jaslene Gonzalez, Brenda Lee and Placebo.
In 1943 in the Solomon Islands, John F. Kennedy's PT-109 was rammed and sunk. Islanders Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana who found Kennedy and the survivors remember that when they rode on PT boats to retrieve the survivors, the Marines sang this song with the natives, who had learned it from Seventh-day Adventist missionaries.[2][3]
This hymn was titled "China" in some hymnals of the 19th century,[4] and was the inspiration for the name of the town of China, Maine.
The song's first stanza can be occasionally heard in the survival horror first-person shooter, BioShock. When the main character is walking around a splicer that has not yet seen the player, they sometimes sing the first stanza of the song, along with phrases that imply their faith.[5]
An eerie, heavily distorted recording of the first stanza and the chorus is played over the credits of the Bible-inspired roguelike computer game The Binding of Isaac, after the full game has been completed ten times.[6]