His Eye Is on the Sparrow

Civilla D. Martin wrote the lyrics to “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” in 1905 after visiting a bedridden woman named Mrs. Doolittle in Elmira, New York, and Charles H. Gabriel set them to music that same year. By the time Ethel Waters made it her own, the hymn was already half a century old; what she brought to it was a theatrical, jazz-trained phrasing that treats the lyric’s central image – God watching a sparrow fall, and by extension watching the singer – less as doctrine recited than as a fact being worked out in real time, verse by verse.

Waters performed the song at Billy Graham’s crusades for the better part of two decades, starting with his first New York crusade at Madison Square Garden in 1957, backed by a 1,500-voice choir under Cliff Barrows. She took the song’s title for her own 1951 autobiography before that run of performances even began, which tells you the connection wasn’t manufactured by the crusade circuit – the crusades adopted her because she’d already made the song hers. What comes through in the recorded version is a kind of unhurried confidence: a voice that isn’t pleading for reassurance so much as reporting a conclusion it already reached.

8.4/10 – a hymn that a lesser voice could turn into a platitude, delivered instead like someone stating a fact she’s tested and found true.

Hero image: Ethel Waters portrait, William P. Gottlieb Collection, Library of Congress. Public domain.