Charles H. Gabriel
Musician · 1856–1932 · Wilton, Iowa
Best known for
Composer
Charles H. Gabriel was a self-taught Iowa-born gospel composer and lyricist who, working largely out of Chicago in the early twentieth century, wrote or compiled an estimated seven to eight thousand songs. His tunes — among them “Brighten the Corner Where You Are” and the music for Ada Habershon’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” — entered the standard country, bluegrass, and Southern-gospel repertoire.
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- Born Charles Hutchinson Gabriel on August 18, 1856, in Wilton, Muscatine County, Iowa; raised on a farm.
- Learned music on his family’s reed organ; though he never received formal training, he was leading shape-note singing schools by age seventeen.
- Served as music director at Grace Methodist Episcopal Church, San Francisco, from 1890 to 1892, where he wrote his first commercial song, “Send the Light.”
- Settled in Chicago and joined Homer Rodeheaver’s gospel publishing company in 1912; supplied much of the music for the Billy Sunday revivals.
- Composed the tune for Ada R. Habershon’s lyric “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” (1907) — the song A.P. Carter rewrote in 1935 as “Can the Circle Be Unbroken (Bye and Bye)” and one of the most-recorded songs in American music.
- Wrote “Brighten the Corner Where You Are” (1913), a gospel standard later cut by everyone from Homer Rodeheaver and George Beverly Shea to country and bluegrass quartets.
- Compiled and edited dozens of songbooks: 35 gospel-song books, 8 Sunday school collections, and many more cantatas, anthems, and instructional volumes.
- Wrote under several pseudonyms, including Charlotte G. Homer, H. A. Henry, and S. B. Jackson.
- Published his autobiography, Sixty Years of Gospel Song, late in life.
- Died in Hollywood, California, on September 14, 1932, at age 76.
