Hymn story
“Honey, what’s the matter? You look so pensive,” Mrs. Black addressed her husband, James, who had just come home from the evening meeting at the local Methodist church where he was Sunday school teacher and president of the Young People’s Society. James made no reply, but went to his desk, took paper, pen, and ink, and began writing. For fifteen minutes he sat, at times writing with feverish abandon, at times with hands clasped and eyes closed in silent concentration. After a final burst of writing he arose, strode to the piano, and begin playing a rousing melody.
His wife, who had been watching with growing curiosity, spoke again. “What’s going on? What did you write? What are you playing? I haven’t heard that tune before.”
“Remember Bessie?” asked James, “the little fourteen-year-old whose been coming to Sunday School recently?”
“Is she that poor girl whose father drinks so?”
“Yes, that’s the one. When I called the roll this evening she didn’t respond. I used the opportunity to speak to the class about what a sad thing it would be if, when one’s name is called from the Lamb’s Book of Life, he should be absent. I then said ‘O God, when my own name is called up yonder, may I be there to respond!’ I longed for a suitable closing hymn to express the thought, but could not think of a single one. On the way home tonight the thought crossed my mind, ‘Why don’t you write the hymn?’ I dismissed the idea, but when I walked in the house a few minutes ago, the first lines of a song came to me. Now I’ve completed the whole thing. Come listen to it and tell me what you think.” James M. Black then went back to the piano and sang the hymn he had just completed, “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder.”
Subsequently, he visited Bessie’s home to find the reason for her absence and discovered she was gravely ill. He called his own doctor to attend to her, but she had developed pneumonia and soon passed away. At her funeral, Black told the story of the hymn that her absence from class had inspired. It was there that the hymn was sung in public for the first time.
Although Black went on to write almost 1,500 songs “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder,” first published in 1892, is the one for which he is remembered.