“Sweet Hour of Prayer” has a text of four eight-line stanzas that reached American print in the New York Observer on 13 September 1845. A letter published with it described a blind preacher named W. W. Walford of Coleshill, Warwickshire, England, who composed poems and carried them in his memory; the writer of the letter, later identified as Thomas Salmon, a minister who had served in Coleshill, said he copied the lines down as Walford recited them. The poem had already been printed earlier the same year in England, in John Stamp’s The Christian’s Spiritual Song Book, whose dedication page is dated 17 January 1845, where it was set to the tune “Those Evening Bells.” Who Walford really was has never been settled: a librarian and a vicar searching Warwickshire directories and church registers found no one of that name, and the true author has still not been identified.
The tune most often sung with it, SWEET HOUR, was composed by William B. Bradbury. It first appears in his Anthem Book (Oliver Ditson & Co., Boston, 1860), and in 1861 he published it with the text in The Golden Chain of Sabbath School Melodies, where he claimed the tune as his own without crediting the author of the words.
The text addresses the “sweet hour of prayer” itself: it calls the singer away from a world of care, carries every wish and grief to God, and has helped the singer escape temptation; in the last stanza the singer vows to cast every care on God and wait for the hour to return.
The Bluegrass Cardinals recorded it on 15 February 1978 at Arthur Smith Studios in Charlotte, North Carolina, in an arrangement credited to the mandolinist Randy Graham, for their CMH album Livin’ in the Good Old Days (CMH 6229), with David Parmley on guitar, Don Parmley on banjo, Warren Blair on fiddle and John Davis on bass.
