‘Jesus Loves Me’ is one of the most popular children’s Christian hymns. Often mothers sing it to their babies as they are rocking them to sleep. Young children learn the song if they go to Sunday school. It has been recorded by many popular musicians, including Whitney Houston, Destiny’s Child, Alabama, Dionne Warwick and Aaron Neville. 

Where did the song come from? Back in 1860, in New York, 40 year old Anna Warner wrote a story called ‘Say and Seal’. At the pivotal point in the story, a young boy is dying and the main character of the story attempts to comfort the boy in his last moments of life by saying the words to ‘Jesus Loves Me’. Although this novel was very popular at the time, it did get forgotten in history, but the words to the poem remained in people’s minds in the last decades of the 1800’s and were often quoted in difficult times as a comfort to others.

A musician and music publisher called William Bradbury then added music to the poem and the refrain ‘Yes Jesus Loves Me’. He published it as a song. In the following years, its popularity spread through the USA and the world…. and the rest is history!

Sources: Wikipedia, Inspirational Archive