Most of us know Fanny Crosby wrote thousands of hymns. What most of us don’t know is that she left us something very close to a songwriting manual!
In Fanny Crosby’s Life-Story, published in 1903, there is an entire chapter called “The Making of a Hymn.” Friends had asked her to take them into her “hymn-workshop or laboratory” and explain how she constructed a hymn. And she did, in detail.
I spent some time digging through that chapter (and her later book, Memories of Eighty Years), and what I found was not what I expected. This was not vague devotional talk about waiting for the Spirit. This was a working songwriter describing her actual process, step by step. Some of it was deeply spiritual. Some of it was surprisingly technical. All of it is useful for anyone who writes songs for the church today.
Here are nine songwriting principles straight from Fanny Crosby’s workshop!
1. Begin with prayer.
Crosby said she never started a hymn without first asking the Lord to be her inspiration in the work she was about to do. She even acknowledged this might seem “a little old-fashioned,” but she did it every single time.
Crosby wrote somewhere around 8,000 hymns over 60 years. She was not a casual hobbyist. She was a professional, working on deadlines, filling orders from publishers. And yet she treated every hymn as spiritual work, not factory work.
If you write songs for worship, this is the foundation. Before you open your laptop, before you pick up the guitar, pray. Ask God to give you something worth singing.
2. Build a mood, but don’t force the hymn.
Here is where Crosby gets surprisingly practical. She admitted there were days she simply was not in the mood to write. (She even joked about trying to compose with a toothache!) But if a hymn needed to be written for a deadline or an upcoming publication, she would “build a mood” by sitting alone and praying until the thoughts and feelings arrived. I love this! Many songwriters only write when they feel like it. A true pro writes daily whether they feel like it or not.
At the same time, Crosby said true hymns “make themselves,” and that no one should attempt to write a hymn unless the ideas flow easily and naturally.
These two ideas might seem like they contradict each other, but they don’t. Crosby was saying: prepare yourself prayerfully, create the conditions for inspiration, but do not force dead material into sacred form. Discipline and dependence on God are not opposites. They work together.
For modern songwriters, this is one of the most useful things she said. You don’t just wait around for a lightning bolt. You sit down, you pray, you get yourself ready. But if nothing comes, you don’t crank out something hollow and call it a hymn.
3. Let the song be born in silence.
In Memories of Eighty Years, Crosby said the most enduring hymns are born in the “silences of the soul,” and that nothing should intrude while they are being shaped into language.
This is a powerful idea, especially for those of us who live in a world of constant noise. Crosby wrote thousands of hymns, but she did not portray the work as busy productivity. She saw it as inward, quiet, prayerful work.
If you’re writing worship songs while checking your phone, scrolling social media, and answering texts, you might want to rethink the environment. Good hymns need quiet before they need words.
4. Listen to what the melody is saying.
Crosby said melodies “tell their own tale,” and the songwriter’s job is to interpret that musical story into language.
The most famous example is “Blessed Assurance.” Phoebe Knapp had composed the tune and played it for Crosby. When Knapp asked what the melody said to her, Crosby answered immediately with the opening words of the hymn: “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine.” She said afterward that the air (the melody) and the hymn were “intended for each other.”
But Crosby also said that when a melody was given to her and it did not suggest a subject right away, she would lay it aside until another time. Not every good tune is ready for words today.
This is practical gold. Don’t just fit syllables to a melody. Listen to the tune. What is it saying? What emotion does it carry? If it’s not speaking to you yet, put it away and come back later.
5. Respect meter, accent, and singability.
Crosby said a false accent or a mistake in meter could greatly weaken a hymn. She went further: many hymns with deep, pious thought had been “crippled and killed” by roughness or irregular measure.
She often used a well-known tune as a guide while composing, not because that tune would become the final match for the hymn, but because it gave her a rhythmic framework to write within.
Good theology still needs good craft. If a lyric is clumsy on the tongue, if the accents fall in the wrong places, people will struggle to sing it, no matter how beautiful the words are on paper. Crosby understood that a hymn is not a poem. It is something a congregation has to sing together, and that demands rhythmic precision.
6. Let the whole hymn form before polishing the parts.
Crosby said she did not commit part of a poem to paper until the entire poem was composed in her mind. Then came pruning and revising.
Remember, Crosby was blind from infancy. Her mind was her notebook. She composed entire hymns mentally, held them in memory, and only then had a friend transcribe them. She said the “books of the mind” are just as real as those on the desk, if we use them enough to keep the pages free from dust.
Most of us will never match that kind of mental capacity, but the principle still applies. There is real value in letting a song take full shape before you start obsessing over individual lines. Get the whole idea down first. Then refine.
7. Let the hymn rest before revising it.
After a hymn was finished, Crosby said she let it lie “in the writing-desk of my mind” for a few days until she could prune it, reread it with memory, and shape it into presentable form. She said plainly: “I often cut, trim, and change.”
This fights the myth that Crosby simply dashed off perfect hymns without effort. She did sometimes write quickly (she famously wrote “Safe in the Arms of Jesus” in 15 minutes while W. H. Doane waited to catch a train). But she also revised. She sat with her work, came back to it, and made it better.
If Fanny Crosby revised her hymns, you and I can revise ours!
8. Gather hymn seeds from ordinary life.
Crosby’s hymns did not all come from mountaintop spiritual experiences. Some came from the most ordinary moments. A friend’s passing remark about sunshine led to “Only a Beam of Sunshine.” A conversation about worldly wealth led to the line “Take the world, but give me Jesus,” which became a hymn title.
The hymn “All the Way My Saviour Leads Me” was born from a very simple experience. Crosby needed five dollars, prayed for it, and a visitor shook her hand and left a five-dollar bill in her palm. Her first thought was, “All the way my Saviour leads me!” She wrote the hymn immediately, and Robert Lowry set it to music.
Sorrow fed her writing too. “Hold Thou My Hand” came out of a dark period and a prayer for the Lord’s guidance.
The point is this: if you pay attention, hymn seeds are everywhere. In conversations, in answered prayers, in hard seasons. Stay alert to them.
9. Work with people who can give your words wings.
Crosby’s career was deeply collaborative. She worked with William B. Bradbury, Willilam H. Doane, Robert Lowry, Ira D. Sankey, J. R. Sweney, W. J. Kirkpatrick, H. P. Main, and many others. She described her hymns as “waiting for their mates,” hoping to make a good “matrimonial alliance” with the right tune. She said Ira Sankey “put new life” into many of her songs.
If you’re writing lyrics, find a composer who understands what you’re trying to say. If you’re writing melodies, find a lyricist who cares about craft and meaning. The right musical partner matters more than most of us realize.
There’s one more thing worth mentioning. Crosby said that late in life, she rejoiced most when she heard that one of her hymns had helped bring someone back to the Lord. That was the whole point for her. Not fame, not volume, not publishing credits. Usefulness.
She found her mission the day William Bradbury asked her to write her first hymn, and she spent the next 60 years fulfilling it. When she talked about her work, she never sounded like someone chasing applause. She sounded like someone who had been given a wonderful job to do and was grateful for every day she got to do it.
Try this: before you sit down to write your next worship song, read through these nine principles one more time. Pick even two or three of them and put them into practice. Pray first. Listen to the melody before you write to it. Let the song rest before you call it finished.
Bottom Line: Fanny Crosby gave us more than 8,000 hymns and a step-by-step look inside her workshop. The least we can do is learn from it.