Charles D. Tillman
Musician · 1861–1943 · Tallassee, Alabama
Best known for
Composer
Charles Davis Tillman was an Alabama-born, Atlanta-based gospel composer, publisher, and song-leader who set M.E. Abbey’s lyric to the tune of “Life’s Railway to Heaven” in 1890 and who, on a 1891 visit to a South Carolina African-American camp meeting, copied down “Old Time Religion” and published the song to a white audience for the first time. His six-decade career produced roughly a hundred songs and twenty-two songbooks.
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- Born March 20, 1861, in Tallassee, Alabama, to evangelist parents; sang and led music as a child on his parents’ revival circuit.
- Spent fourteen years as a young man working outside the church — house painter, organ salesman, medicine-show singer, minstrel-show manager — before returning to sacred music.
- Established his own gospel-music publishing house in Atlanta in 1887; ran it for the rest of his life.
- Wrote the tune to “Life’s Railway to Heaven” in 1890, setting M.E. Abbey’s lyric; the hymn has since been recorded by the Carter Family, Bill Monroe, Roy Acuff, Boxcar Willie, Johnny Cash, and many others.
- Heard “My Old Time Religion” sung at an African-American camp meeting in South Carolina in 1891; wrote it down on the spot, revised it later, and published it in his songbook the same year — the song’s first appearance in white American gospel singing.
- Wrote roughly 100 songs and published 22 songbooks over his career.
- Inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 1993.
- Died in Atlanta on September 2, 1943; buried at Westview Cemetery beneath a monument bearing a line of “Life’s Railway to Heaven.”
