“Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?” was written by Eliza E. Hewitt (words) and John R. Sweney (music) in 1897 — Hewitt a Philadelphia Sunday school teacher and prolific hymn-text writer, Sweney a music professor whose compositions appear in virtually every late-19th-century evangelical hymnal. The song asks a simple question: will the narrator, at the end of a life of service, have earned any of the golden crowns the Book of Revelation promises to the righteous? The humility of the question — no certainty, just hope — is the source of its emotional hold across denominational lines and more than a century of congregational use.
The Cox Family came to national attention through their collaboration with Alison Krauss: a family bluegrass/gospel group from Cotton Valley, Webster Parish, northwestern Louisiana, founded in 1972 by patriarch Willard Cox, whose children Evelyn, Lynn, Sidney, and Suzanne grew up performing gospel and country music at local fairs and church socials across Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas before Krauss brought them to Rounder Records.
Krauss and the Cox Family recorded it for I Know Who Holds Tomorrow (Rounder Records, 1994), which won the Grammy Award for Best Southern, Country or Bluegrass Gospel Album in 1995. The album demonstrates what the acoustic gospel tradition sounds like when performed by musicians whose relationship to that tradition is devotional rather than archival — the Cox family in particular singing gospel the way their community had always sung it, with or without a record contract.
