ABSTRACT
Charles Hutchinson Gabriel (Wilton, Iowa; 18 August 1856 – Los Angeles, California; 14 September 1932) became one of our most beloved gospel song composers. 1 (A likeness of Gabriel appears on page 325.) His music is inalienably associated with urban revivalism. At the zenith of his career between 1911 and 1925, he was editor-in-chief for Homer Rodeheaver, Billy Sunday’s gospel voice and publisher. Gabriel’s books about the genre were all published during those years. Yet while his hymn-composition talent was largely recognized only in the twentieth century, his career began and bore fruit in the milieu of secular as much as religious music during the nineteenth century. Even many compositions prepared for religious institutions throughout his career have almost surprisingly secular texts. 2 Indeed, although the first composition for which Gabriel received acceptance for publication was a hymn, the first of his own words and music he ever submitted, when age thirteen or fourteen, was a duet for soprano and alto with chorus, representative of the nineteenth-century American song tradition. George F. Root, its publisher, years later “remembered the circumstances surrounding the manuscript although thousands of songs had passed through his hands since that time.” 3
