“Power in the Blood,” properly “There Is Power in the Blood,” was written in 1899 by Lewis Edgar Jones, who also composed the tune. Jones was born in Yates City, Illinois, in 1865 and graduated from Moody Bible Institute in the same class as the evangelist Billy Sunday, but he spent his working life in YMCA work, as physical director in Davenport, Iowa, and later general secretary in Fort Worth, Texas, and Santa Barbara, California. He wrote the hymn while attending a camp meeting at Mountain Lake Park, Maryland. Henry Lake Gilmour bought the manuscript and printed it with William J. Kirkpatrick in Songs of Praise and Victory, compiled in Philadelphia in 1899; it appeared again that year in Kirkpatrick’s Gospel Praises.
The text asks the listener a series of questions: would you be free from the burden of sin, win a victory over evil, be made whiter than snow, serve Jesus and sing his praises? Each is answered with the same line, that there is power in the blood, and the chorus gathers it into a refrain on the power of the Lamb’s blood. The hymn’s tune was borrowed in 1913 for Joe Hill’s labor song “There Is Power in a Union,” published in the Industrial Workers of the World’s Little Red Songbook.
Bluegrass gospel recordings of the hymn include several from the 1970s and 1980s. The Easter Brothers and the Green Valley Quartet recorded it in Nashville for a Mission LP released in 1974, with Russell Easter on lead. Raymond Fairchild played it as a banjo instrumental on his Rural Rhythm LP King of the 5-String Banjo (1976). The Lewis Family cut it at Opryland in Nashville in 1982 for a Canaan LP issued the next year. The Weary Hearts recorded it for their 1989 Flying Fish album By Heart, with Chris Jones singing lead, Ron Block on lead guitar, Butch Baldassari on mandolin and Mike Bub on bass.
