The tune had been lost to history. For 140 years, church members
have sung the song to a different tune, one commissioned by Taylor
himself.
A year before President Taylor died in 1887, he sang the song for
composer Ebenezer Beesley the way he sang it at Carthage jail in
Illinois before a mob stormed the jail and shot and killed Smith and
his brother Hyrum and wounded Taylor and Willard Richards.
Beesley recorded the tune in his choir book. Then he composed a
different one for the song for a new hymn book commissioned for
the church by Taylor, and Beesley's arrangement is the only one
known to generations of Latter-day Saints.
A Taylor descendant recently uncovered the Beesley choir book, and
historian Jeffrey N. Walker presented his arrangement of the song
at a church history symposium on Taylor held Friday at Brigham
Young University.
A quartet that included Walker's son performed the song at the
conference. Taylor's tune wouldn't be completely unfamiliar to
Latter-day Saints, but it is more upbeat and some notes have a
distinct Irish-Celtic sound.
"We heard a hymn that changed us a bit," Walker said after the
performance, "that transported us back to a day in Carthage,
amongst the leaders of the church as they contemplated the role
that the church would have through the world, and while that day
(the mob) may have taken two of the greatest who have ever lived,
John was there (as) more than just a recorder, he was there to
capture the essence of the day."
The Smiths were in jail on a charge of treason based on the
affidavit of two men whose word, according to Taylor, wasn't worth
5 cents. Taylor and Richards joined them for support, and on the
afternoon the brothers died, Taylor sang "A Poor Wayfaring Man of
Grief."
Hyrum Smith so liked the song that he asked Taylor to sing it a
second time. Taylor tried to decline because of the gloomy mood --
he later called it "a remarkable depression of spirits" -- in the
second-story room of the jail but Hyrum Smith insisted, telling
Taylor he'd get the spirit of it once he began. Those facts endear
the recovered tune to Walker.
"I like it because John Taylor sang it that way," Walker said. "I
like it also that Hyrum liked it."
The song began as a poem written by English poet James Montgomery
during two chilly, dreary trips in horse-drawn carriages in
England in December 1826. Titled "The Stranger and His Friend,"
Montgomery didn't expect the poem to become a hymn.
A New York preacher named George Coles set the poem to music, to a
tune he named Duane Street after the address of one of his
churches. Taylor learned the hymn in England on a mission and
included it in a Mormon hymnal published there in 1840 under his
direction and that of Brigham Young and Parley P. Pratt. Pratt was
the missionary who converted Taylor. Young would succeed Joseph
Smith as church president, and Taylor would follow Young as the
church's third president.
The hymnal didn't include music or even the name of a tune, only
Montgomery's lyrics. Taylor sang it to a different tune than Duane
Street. The new song with Taylor's tune had been introduced in
Nauvoo, Ill., before the martyrdom of the Smiths. The hymnal
included all seven verses of the song, which settles the question
for Walker of whether Taylor sang all seven verses at Carthage.
Taylor apparently thought the hymn's tune needed to be more
elegant.
"He'd write he didn't like the tune," Walker said. "He thought it
was quite plain."
Taylor asked Beesley to compose a new tune at the same time he
launched a committee to create a new hymnbook for the church. The
result was the Psalmody, completed in 1889, two years after
Taylor's death.
"The one we have in our hymnbook now is a little more elegant, a
little more formal, a little more memorial," Walker said.
The church is celebrating the 200th anniversary of Taylor's birth
next month, and Taylor descendants lauded Walker for presenting
the song at Friday's conference.
"It's wonderful we now have that tune," Mark H. Taylor said. "We
now have the tune as sung in Carthage jail."
CLICK HERE
for a pdf of Elder Taylor's tune for this hymn - the tune he sang at
Carthage Jail.