Elisha Hoffman
Musician · 1839–1929 · Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania
Best known for
Songwriter
Elisha A. Hoffman was a Presbyterian minister and prolific gospel hymn writer whose more than two thousand compositions and fifty-plus edited songbooks shaped American congregational singing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The bluegrass and Southern-gospel repertoire still carries several of his standards — “Are You Washed in the Blood?” and “I Must Tell Jesus” among them.
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- Born Elisha Albright Hoffman on May 7, 1839, in Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania, to a minister in the Evangelical Association.
- Educated at Philadelphia Central High School and Union Seminary of the Evangelical Association.
- Spent eleven years at the Evangelical Association’s publishing house in Cleveland, Ohio, before turning to full-time pastoral work.
- Served Presbyterian congregations in Cleveland and Grafton, Ohio in the 1880s; Benton Harbor, Michigan in the mid-1890s; and Cabery, Illinois from 1911 to 1922.
- Wrote both words and music for many of his hymns and edited more than fifty gospel songbooks over his career.
- Best-known compositions include “Are You Washed in the Blood?,” “I Must Tell Jesus,” “What a Wonderful Saviour!,” and “Is Your All on the Altar?”
- Died November 25, 1929, in Chicago, Illinois, at age 90, and was buried at Oak Woods Cemetery.
