A young choir boy at a Methodist church in Pennsylvania could hardly have imagined that his voice would become the soundtrack of one of the greatest urban revivals of the nineteenth century. Ira David Sankey was born on August 28, 1840, in Edinburg, Pennsylvania, the son of a banker and Methodist lay preacher.
While still young, he served in the Union Army during the American Civil War, between 1861 and 1863, holding services and organizing choirs even in the midst of the conflict. Back in Pennsylvania, he became a Sunday school superintendent and choir leader in New Castle, as well as a federal revenue officer alongside his father.
In 1870, at a Young Men’s Christian Association convention in Indianapolis, he sang the hymn “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood” and caught the attention of the preacher Dwight L. Moody. Moody invited him to leave his public post and serve with him in Chicago, telling him he had been looking for a man like him for eight years.
From 1871 on, Sankey became the official singer of Moody’s crusades, joining preaching and music in a way then unusual in urban churches. In campaigns across Britain, between 1873 and 1875, and later throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico, his voice and his portable organ became an essential part of the mass gatherings.
Sankey compiled and edited collections such as Sacred Songs and Solos and Gospel Hymns, which sold tens of millions of copies and spread the hymns of writers such as Fanny Crosby and Philip Bliss. He also composed melodies of his own, among them “The Ninety and Nine,” born from a poem he came across by chance in a newspaper, on a train in Scotland.
Not everything in his ministry withstands scrutiny by today’s standards: in campaigns across the southern United States, the services followed the racial segregation then in force, with separate seating and choirs for Black and white attendees, and Sankey himself recorded that the Black choir was made to sing alone, at times simply to show white audiences how to sing. The constant vocal strain also took its toll, forcing breaks in his tours in 1881, 1891, and 1893.
In his final years, no longer accompanied by Moody, who died in 1899, Sankey lost his sight to glaucoma in 1903 and lived blind until the end. He wrote his memoirs, My Life and Sacred Songs, published in 1906, and died on August 13, 1908, in Brooklyn, New York.
Sankey’s legacy outlasted his own voice: he established the pattern of interweaving song and preaching, a practice now common in churches and crusades around the world. His example shows that music, used with humility, can prepare hearts even before the first word of the sermon.
