Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling

Will L. Thompson (1847–1909) of East Liverpool, Ohio, trained at the New England Conservatory and in Leipzig, Germany, and had early success writing popular songs. But when he took his work to commercial publishers, they offered him far less than he believed the songs were worth. So Thompson did something audacious: he went home and founded his own publishing company.

It worked. Will L. Thompson & Co. grew into one of the most successful music businesses in America, and the man the publishers turned away became known as 'the millionaire songwriter.' A devout member of his hometown Presbyterian congregation, Thompson increasingly pointed his gift toward sacred music. It is said he would load an upright piano onto a two-horse wagon and drive into the Ohio countryside, singing his gospel songs for villages too small for the famous revival preachers to ever visit.

He kept a notebook everywhere he went. 'No matter where I am,' he explained, 'at home or hotel, at the store or traveling, if an idea or theme comes to me that I deem worthy of a song, I jot it down in verse.'

In 1880 Thompson wrote both the words and the music of 'Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling' and published it through his own company. It became one of the great invitation hymns — sung quietly at the close of revival meetings as listeners weighed the Savior's call.

The hymn is really the parable of the prodigal son set to music. Its Jesus does not shout or scold; He calls softly, 'watching for you and for me' — like the father in the parable who saw his son 'when he was yet a great way off' and ran to him. The refrain makes the invitation plain: 'Come home, come home; ye who are weary, come home.'

The great evangelist Dwight L. Moody and his song leader Ira Sankey used Thompson's hymn throughout their campaigns in America and Britain. In 1899, as Moody lay dying at his home in Northfield, Massachusetts, Thompson came to visit.

As the story is told, the doctor was turning visitors away — but Moody heard his friend's voice and called him to the bedside. 'Will,' he reportedly said, 'I would rather have written "Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling" than anything I have been able to do in my whole life.' The account was written down decades later, so the exact words are tradition rather than record — but it endures because everyone who loved Moody found it easy to believe.

It ran through the Oscar-winning film The Trip to Bountiful in 1985, and it has been recorded by voices from the Andrews Sisters to Carrie Underwood — nearly a century and a half of singers answering the same soft call.

Here is the surprise for Latter-day Saint families: they have been singing Will L. Thompson for generations without knowing it. He wrote both 'Have I Done Any Good?' and 'Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel' — fixtures of the 1985 hymnal.

Yet 'Softly and Tenderly,' his masterpiece, was never in an official LDS hymnbook. The Tabernacle Choir sang it in general conferences over the years, and on February 13, 2025, it finally joined the family as hymn #1020 in Hymns—For Home and Church — three Thompson hymns, together at last.