Few evangelical hymns stir the heart like ‘It Is Well with My Soul’. The melody that carries those words was born from the talent of a man who grew up in poverty and died young, in one of the worst railroad disasters in United States history.
Philip Paul Bliss was born on July 9, 1838, in a log cabin in Hollywood, Clearfield County, Pennsylvania. The son of a devout father who read the Bible and prayed daily with the family, he grew up among farms and logging camps, with little formal schooling.
At age twelve, in 1850, he made his first public profession of faith and was baptized by immersion at the Baptist church in Cherry Flats, Tioga County. As a boy, he heard a piano for the first time and was captivated by the sound, a memory he would carry for the rest of his life.
In 1859 he married Lucy Young, from a musical family, who encouraged him to develop his gift for composition. The couple moved to Chicago in 1864, where Bliss went to work for the publisher Root and Cady, composing hymns and leading musical conventions across the American Midwest.
In 1869 he met the evangelist Dwight L. Moody, who urged him to dedicate his music to the gospel. Alongside Major Daniel W. Whittle, he composed ‘Hold the Fort’ and ‘Jesus Loves Even Me’, and in 1874 he left secular work to sing full time in evangelistic campaigns.
In 1876 he wrote the melody that would accompany the verses Horatio Spafford had written for ‘It Is Well with My Soul’, a hymn born of a father’s grief after losing his daughters at sea. Bliss never copyrighted his compositions and gave the proceeds from his hymnals to charitable causes.
On December 29, 1876, traveling by train to Chicago, Bliss and Lucy died in the Ashtabula railroad disaster in Ohio: an iron bridge gave way under the train in the middle of a snowstorm, plunging the cars into the ravine and setting off a fire. The couple’s bodies were never identified with certainty among the wreckage. One period account, attributed to a single witness, claimed that Bliss had escaped the flames and gone back to try to free Lucy, who was trapped in the wreckage; his own friend and biographer D. W. Whittle recorded the following year that the story was mere conjecture, never confirmed by any survivor. The couple left behind two young sons, Philip Paul Jr. and George Goodwin, who were raised afterward by relatives.
Bliss’s suitcase arrived intact in Chicago, containing the unpublished manuscript of ‘I Will Sing of My Redeemer’, completed by another composer after his death. His hymns crossed the Atlantic with the Moody and Sankey revivals and, more than a century later, still give voice to the faith of churches around the world.
