I need Thee every hour

I need Thee every hour. Annie Sherwood Hawks* (1835-1918). These stanzas were written in April 1872, when Hawks was busy with her daily household tasks, and suddenly felt a ‘sense of the nearness of God’. She wrote down the words that came to her, and gave the five stanzas to her pastor, Robert Lowry*, who composed the tune, NEED, and added the refrain in the manner characteristic of gospel hymnody: ‘I need thee, O I need thee;/Every hour I need Thee’. It was sung at the National Baptist Sunday School Convention, Cincinnati, 1872, and published in booklet form then. It rapidly became popular after Lowry and William Howard Doane* published it in Royal Diadem for the Sunday School (New York,...