Ada Blenkhorn
Musician · 1858–1927 · Cobourg, Ontario, Canada
Best known for
Songwriter
Ada Blenkhorn was an Ontario-born American hymn writer whose 1899 lyric “Keep on the Sunny Side” — set to a tune by J. Howard Entwisle — passed from Methodist gospel meetings into country music after the Carter Family adopted it as their radio closing theme in the late 1920s.
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- Born in 1858 in Cobourg, Ontario, Canada, the tenth of eleven children.
- Emigrated to the United States with her family in 1884 and settled in the Midwest.
- Raised in the Methodist tradition.
- Began writing hymn lyrics around 1892 at age thirty-four.
- Wrote more than three hundred gospel texts over her career.
- Drew the “Keep on the Sunny Side” refrain from a phrase her disabled nephew used about wanting his wheelchair pushed down “the sunny side” of the street.
- J. Howard Entwisle set her lyric to its familiar tune in 1899.
- The Carter Family cut the song in 1928 and made it the closing-theme of their long radio career; it remains a country, bluegrass, and folk-revival standard.
- Died in 1927.