Hometown hero

When I think about reuniting with loved ones in heaven, my godparents, Elsie and Clayton Kepler, are always on the short list. They were a salt-of-the-earth, Bible-believing Christian couple so honest, sincere and good to the core.

Elsie, for one, had a childlike innocence about her, for which she was sometimes slighted/belittled by some of my grandmother's other friends. One of the sad stories from her life was when she had her hair done at the beauty parlor and a negligent hairdresser left perm chemicals on her scalp too long, causing Elsie to go bald. She had a to wear a dark-brown wig that was somewhat ill-fitting.

Elsie was an erratic driver who once scared the daylights out of me and my sister when she went through a red light in a busy intersection on the way to the department store Higbees (which she always mispronounced Hig-uh-bees).

I was reminded of the Keplers yesterday when I looked up the creator of a classic hymn that was playing in my head, Since I Have Been Redeemed, and learned that he was from the same tiny farm town (Uniontown, Ohio, platted in 1816 outside my hometown of Akron) where the Keplers grew crops and raised animals on a farm that had been in Clayte's family for generations.

According to Hymnary.Org, Edwin Othello Excell (1851-1921) was born and raised in Uniontown and worked as a bricklayer and plasterer before moving to Chicago to study music under George Root, an American songwriter and music educator who found fame during the Civil War with songs such as "Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!" and the "The Battle Cry of Freedom".

Excell, who was evangelist Sam Jones' song leader for two decades, established a music publishing house in Chicago and authored or composed over 3,000 gospel songs. He was the highest volume producer of hymnbooks in America at the time of his death, which came shortly after he fell ill assisting Gypsy Smith in a city-wide revival crusade in Louisville, KY.

Wikipedia confirms that Excell's "1909 stanza selection and arrangement of Amazing Grace became the most widely used and familiar setting of that hymn by the second half of the twentieth century.^[2] The influence of his sacred music on American popular culture through revival meetings, religious conventions, circuit chautauquas, and church hymnals was substantial enough by the 1920s to garner a satirical reference by Sinclair Lewis in the novel Elmer Gantry.^[3]"