Stand by Me

Charles Albert Tindley (1851–1933) was born in Berlin, Maryland, to an enslaved father and a free mother — legally free himself, but 'bound out' as a hired child laborer among enslaved people. He later said of those years that he often competed with the dogs for the scraps that fell from his master's table.

No one taught him letters. He gathered discarded scraps of paper and puzzled them out himself — 'I continued in this way,' he recalled, 'and without any teacher, until I could read the Bible.'

After the Civil War, Tindley moved to Philadelphia, carried bricks for a living, and worked as the janitor of the Bainbridge Street Methodist Episcopal Church. While sweeping its floors he was quietly becoming a scholar: he completed a theology course by correspondence and learned Greek and Hebrew with private tutors, though he never spent a day in college.

In 1902, the church he had cleaned called him back — as its pastor. Under his preaching the congregation grew from around 130 members to some ten thousand, drawing worshippers of many races and nations, and during the Depression it fed more than five hundred people a day. The church was renamed Tindley Temple while he still stood in its pulpit.

Tindley had no formal musical training — he simply sang his songs as part of his preaching, and musicians wrote them down. The 'arr. Francis A. Clark' in this hymn's credit is one of them: a Philadelphia choirmaster who transcribed and harmonized Tindley's melodies so the world could sing them.

He wrote about fifty gospel hymns, and their influence is hard to overstate — one scholar calls him the 'father of African American hymnody' and the 'progenitor of African American gospel music.' Even Ben E. King's 1961 pop classic 'Stand by Me' traces its ancestry through gospel songs in the Tindley tradition.

Tindley published 'Stand by Me' in 1905, in his collection Soul Echoes. Each verse names a different storm — the world tossing us 'like a ship upon the sea,' tribulation, faults and failures, persecution, growing old — and answers every one of them with the same plea.

The image comes straight from Mark 4, where the disciples wake the sleeping Savior in the sinking boat, and He stills the sea. Tindley's genius was to notice that the prayer of that story is everyone's prayer, in every kind of storm.

'Stand by Me' was released as hymn #1050 on September 18, 2025, in the fifth batch of Hymns—For Home and Church — very likely the first Charles Tindley hymn ever to appear in an official Latter-day Saint hymnbook.

The pairing with Restoration scripture is uncanny: in the Doctrine and Covenants the Lord promises, 'Be of good cheer, and do not fear, for I the Lord am with you, and will stand by you.' Tindley's hymn is that verse, sung back to heaven.