'Blessed Assurance'...Fanny Crosby wrote more than 8,000 hymns and used more than 200 pen names. Under contract to a music publisher, she wrote 3 new hymns each week during much of her adult life. The fact that she was blind didn't diminish her productivity. She would formulate an entire song in her mind and then dictate it to a friend or secretary.
Phoebe Palmer Knapp, wife of the founder of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, composed a tune in 1873 and brought it to Crosby in Brooklyn. "Play it for me on the organ," Crosby asked. Knapp did and then asked, "What does this tune say?" She turned to see Crosby kneeling in prayer. Knapp played it a second time and then a third. Then the blind woman responded: "That says, 'Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! O what a foretaste of glory divine!"
This hymn was sung in the 1985 Academy Award winning movie; 'Trip to Bountiful.'
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