Cover of "It Is Well With My Soul"

[RPaul]

By the time the COVID-19 lockdowns started here in Orange County, California on St. Patrick's Day, I'd been having some trouble focusing on new creative work with all the new information (and misinformation) flooding in regularly. For whatever reason, I pulled out a hymnal I'd picked up at a used book store a few years back and started playing through it.

"It Is Well With My Soul" struck me as particularly applicable in these times. Its story arose from tragedy in the life of the lyricist, Horatio Spafford. He'd been a successful lawyer and real estate investor in Chicago, but his young son died, then he lost most of his properties in the great Chicago fire. A while after that, he made plans to travel with his wife and four daughters to Europe, but his family went ahead due to his having some business to wrap up first. On their way over, the ship they were traveling on sank, and only his wife survived. When he finally traveled over to join her, he wrote the lyrics to the well-known hymn around the spot where his daughters had died. It is a song about finding comfort in our faith in the midst of anything we might face.

I made this recording over a two week period starting on Palm Sunday and put this lyric video together yesterday:

https://youtu.be/9u04VkJtuEw

It's also available now on most of the usual streaming and download sites (for some reason not yet on Amazon). A list of links to my profile on some key ones can be found at http://rickpaulmusic.com/quick-links/.

Rick