FANNY CROSBY Part One (1820-1915)
Fanny Crosby undoubtedly holds the record for the greatest impact in American hymns and gospel songs… between 8000 and 9000 creations from this famous blind hymnist, and over 100 million of them in print….
It all began, this ability to create, to communicate in words, and to remember, from the power of Scripture…
When she was only 6 weeks old, a doctor prescribed a hot poultice treatment for her eye infection, destroying the corneas, leaving her blind for life. Less than a year later her father died, leaving her mother to find employment to support the family. Her grandmother stepped in to help… but died a few years later… By that time an amazing scenario had developed in this precocious child.
Eunice Crosby spent many hours reading the Bible to Fanny and teaching her the importance of prayer and a close relationship with God. She quickly discovered that Fanny had an amazing capacity for memorization and encouraged her to learn large passages of scripture by heart.
Memorizing five chapters of the Bible each week, even as a child she could recite the entire books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Proverbs, the Song of Solomon, many of the Psalms, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
In her own words Fanny said later, “The Holy Book has nurtured my entire life.” This process was due to the combined influence of her mother, her grandmother, and the Crosbys’ landlady, a Mrs. Hawley, who helped Fanny in her memorization of the Bible.
Years later, she developed the ability to create hymn lyrics on demand, sometimes 5 or 6 in one day, remembering them later to recite for someone to write them. Her sheer volume of poetry became somewhat overwhelming for her publishers, so she developed nearly 200 pseudonyms. www.cyberhymnal.org lists over 400 of her hymns… many of them available with full texts today…
She describes her “system” of creating… and remembering… in her own words:
After any particular hymn is done, I let it lie for a few days in the writing-desk of my mind, so to speak, until I have leisure to prune it, to read it through with the eyes of my memory, and in other ways mould it into as presentable shape as possible. I often cut, trim, and change it.
“How can you remember a hymn?” I am often asked. To this I need only reply that recollecting is not entirely a lost art, although we live in rushing days of memorandum tablets and carefully-kept journals and ledgers.
The books of the mind are just as real and tangible as those of the desk and the library shelves—if we only will use them enough to keep their binding flexible, and their pages free from dust.
I have no trouble in sorting and arranging my literary and lyric wares within the apartments of my mind. If I were given a little while in which to do it, I could take down from its shelves, hundreds if not thousands of hymns, that I have written during the sixty years in which I have been praising my Redeemer through this medium of song.
Do not let go to decay and ruin those vast interior regions of thought and feeling, good brother or sister!
Your memory would be much to you if you were ever deprived of some of the organs of sense that now so distract you from deep and continued thought.
~Fanny Crosby’s Life Story
by Fanny Crosby—Frances Jane (Crosby) Van Alstyne
Matthew 17:27 “…go to the sea and cast a hook, and take up the first fish that comes up. And when you have opened its mouth, you shall find a coin; take that, and give it to them for Me and you.” ~Jesus speaking to Peter
THE WITHERED LEG
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