“Angel Band” is a 19th-century American gospel song with two parents. The lyrics, originally titled “My Latest Sun Is Sinking Fast,” are credited to Jefferson Hascall and first appeared in 1860 in J. W. Dadmun’s tunebook The Melodeon, set to a tune by Dadmun himself. Two years later William Batchelder Bradbury — the prolific American gospel composer also responsible for “Sweet Hour of Prayer” and “Jesus Loves Me” — published a different melody for the lyrics under the title “The Land of Beulah,” and it is Bradbury’s tune that has carried the song into modern hymnals and recordings.
The song spread quickly through the shape-note tradition: William Walker included it in Christian Harmony in 1866, alongside scores of other 19th-century gospel staples. By the early 20th century it had become a fixture in Southern gospel and Appalachian church singing, where the chorus — “Oh, come angel band / Come and around me stand” — lent itself to the close, ringing harmony singing characteristic of those traditions.
The Stanley Brothers’ recording remains the most influential version of the song in the bluegrass and country canons, and that performance carried “Angel Band” to a new audience when it was placed as the closing track on the Grammy-winning O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack album in 2000. The song has since been recorded by Emmylou Harris and many others, and it stays one of the most-sung gospel pieces at bluegrass funerals and Sunday-morning sets alike.
