Album
Musicians
“The Model Church” began as a poem by John H. Yates, a monologue in which an old man tells his wife about the church he attended that day. The building is a better one than the meetinghouse of his youth, but he finds it was not built for show. The sexton, seeing that he is old, deaf and poor, leads him up the aisle to a pew instead of leaving him at the back; the preacher calls on everyone to sing, and the hymn is “Coronation.” Hearing the old hymns again makes him think of the shore he is nearing, and the last lines look ahead to a place with no sorrow.
Ira D. Sankey, the singing evangelist of D. L. Moody’s meetings, recalled in his 1906 memoir that he found the poem in a newspaper, wrote music for it and sang it for the first time at a gathering of ministers and Christian workers in Atlanta, Georgia, that Moody was conducting. He wrote that it was afterwards used repeatedly as a solo at meetings on the subject of reaching the masses, and that he later met Yates, of Batavia, New York, and urged him to write more gospel hymns. The text was in print by 1887, when it appeared in the hymnal Favorite Songs.
J.D. Crowe and the Kentucky Mountain Boys recorded it for The Model Church, an all-gospel album on Lemco (LLP-611, April 1971), with Doyle Lawson, Larry Rice and Bobby Slone; Rebel reissued it in 1979. Crowe, Lawson and Tony Rice, with Bobby Hicks and Todd Phillips, recorded the song again for The Bluegrass Album (Rounder, 1981), with Rice on lead vocal. Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys recorded it on 31 March 1983 at Maggard Sound Studios in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, for Child of the King (Rebel REB 1619), with Stanley on banjo, Charlie Sizemore and Junior Blankenship on guitars, Curly Ray Cline on fiddle and Jack Cooke on bass.
Assisted by AI.
Spot something off? Help us fix it.
