Our Singing Country

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	Our Singing Country
	OH, LOVELY APPEARANCE OF DEATH g'. No. 1491. Mr. and Mrs. Boyd Hoskins, Clay County, Ky., 1937, and note from Ola E. Winslow, American Broadside Verse (Yale Univ. Press). Reverend George Whitefield, a distinguished follower of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, ten years before his death wrote this song to be sung at his own funeral. Although he had been a minister of the Church of England and a graduate of Oxford, Whitefield became the first circuit rider in the American Colonies. His parish extended to the most remote settle­ment, and his preaching and influence established Methodism firmly. Ben­jamin Franklin estimated that Whitefield's magnetic and powerful voice could reach an audience of twenty thousand. He made seven trips from England to America, staying sometimes several years. When Whitefield died in 1770, Phillis, a seventeen-year-old Negro girl only nine years out of Africa, who belonged to J. Wheatley of Boston, wrote a sixty-two-line "elegiac poem on the death of the celebrated Divine and eminent servant of Jesus Christ, the late Reverend and pious George Whitefield, Chaplain to the Right Honourable the Countess of Huntingdon, who made his exit from this transitory state to dwell in the celestial realms of bliss on Lord's Day, when he was seized with a fit of asthma at Newbury-port near Boston, in New England. "He leaves this world for Heaven's unmeasured Height, And worlds unknown receive him from our sight." The following version of George Whitefield's funeral hymn was sung for us by a deacon and a deaconess of the Hard-Shell Baptists in Clay County, Ky., in 1937.