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Like the first wave, the classic hymns of the nineteenth century featured redemptive encounter with the living Christ described through images, tropes, metaphors, and quotations from the Bible. Evangelicalism always involved more than Christ-centered, biblically normed religious experience. But for leaders and followers alike, especially in day-to-day ordinary experience, that kind of piety remained the defining center of evangelical movements.

In the North Atlantic countries, massive efforts in evangelism, voluntary social reform, and the refinement of taste led to something like an evangelical cultural hegemony. One commonplace measure of nineteenth-century evangelical cultural influence is found in the incredible popularity of the hymns of Fanny Crosby of Brooklyn, New York. Among the approximately 8,500 hymns that this blind author wrote, dozens became defining emblems of evangelical experience:

Tell me the story of Jesus,
Write on my heart ev'ry word; …

All the way my Savior leads me;
What have I to ask beside? …

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!
O what a foretaste of glory divine!
… … … … … … … … … … …
This is my story, this is my song,
Praising my Savior all the day long.

The decades between the American War for Independence and the Civil War witnessed an accelerating evangelization of African Americans, both slave and free. When allowed, churches were formed and blacks exerted great energy in learning to read the Bible. Whether allowed or not, African Americans sang of their faith. The most distinctive form of that singing was the spiritual. Al though authorship, origin, and exact distribution of many spirituals lie beyond historical recovery, by midcentury the spiritual had become a sturdy anchor of African-American religion. The life course reflected in those spirituals was very different from the world in which Fanny Crosby lived. But one thing was similar: the use of biblical materials focused on the omnicompetence of Jesus Christ:

What ship is this that's landed at the shore!
Oh, glory halleluiah!
It's the old ship of Zion, halleluiah! …
What kind of Captain does she have on board?
Oh, glory halleluiah!
King Jesus is the Captain, halleluiah . …

The third wave of classic evangelical hymnody, which produced the gospel song, appeared at the turn of the twentieth century. For white evangelicals, Ira Sankey led the way. As D. L. Moody's songleader, Sankey was an indispensable contributor to Moody's phenomenal success in England, Scotland, Canada, and the United States. Much more than anything Moody ever wrote, Sankey's songs long continued to speak of powerful evangelical sentiments:

There were ninety and nine that safely lay
In the shelter of the fold,
But one was out on the hills away,
Far off from the gates of gold.
… … … … … … … … … … …
[N]one of the ransomed ever knew
How deep were the waters crossed;
Nor how dark was the night that the Lord passed through
Ere he found his sheep that was lost.

The black counterpart to Ira Sankey was Charles A. Tindley, who, through patience, persistence, and tireless promotion convinced large numbers of African-American churches to enrich their singing with new hymns adjusted to a new era. Tindley is best known for a song published in 1916 that was later amalgamated with the spiritual "I'll Be All Right" and sung to the tune of the latter spiritual as an anthem of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and '70s. In its original version, the hymn's most telling effect was to demonstrate continuity with the Christ-centered emphases of earlier evangelicalism:

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July 12 1999, Vol. 43, No. 8