E.O. Excell
Musician · 1851–1921 · Stark County, Ohio
Best known for
Songwriter
Edwin Othello Excell was a Chicago gospel composer, publisher, and song leader who, across a forty-year career, wrote or compiled some two thousand gospel songs and edited roughly fifty songbooks that sold close to ten million copies by 1914. His 1909 selection and arrangement of “Amazing Grace” — setting John Newton’s verses to a new harmonization — became the standard version of the hymn in the twentieth century.
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- Born December 13, 1851, in Stark County, Ohio.
- Worked the first dozen years of his adult life as a plasterer and bricklayer before turning full-time to music.
- Began teaching shape-note country singing schools in 1871.
- Established a music publishing house in Chicago that became one of the largest gospel-music publishers in America by the early twentieth century.
- Wrote or compiled roughly 2,000 gospel songs over his career.
- Edited some fifty gospel songbooks and contributed to nearly forty more.
- Published his 1909 arrangement of “Amazing Grace” in Coronation Hymns; that stanza selection became the standard version of the hymn.
- Collaborated as song leader on revival campaigns with Sam P. Jones, Gipsy Smith, J. Wilbur Chapman, and Charles Reign Scoville.
- Fell ill while assisting Gipsy Smith with a Louisville revival in 1920; returned to Chicago and died at Wesley Memorial Hospital on June 10, 1921.