Samuel A. Ward
Samuel Augustus Ward (Dec. 28, 1847 – Sept. 28, 1903) was an American organist and composer. Born in Newark, New Jersey, he studied music in New York and became an organist at Grace Episcopal Church in his home town in 1880.
He is remembered for the 1882 tune "Materna," which he intended as a setting for the hymn "O Mother Dear, Jerusalem." This was published ten years later, in 1892. Later still, in 1910, after Ward had died, the tune was combined by a publisher with the Katharine Lee Bates poem "America," itself first published in 1895, to create the patriotic song "America the Beautiful." Ward never met Bates.
Samuel Augustus Ward was the founder and first director of the still extant Orpheus Club of Newark, where he died in 1903 leaving no surviving children[citation needed]. Buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in the same city, he was the last in an unbroken line of Samuel Wards, beginning with the Rhode Island Governor and Representative to the Continental Congress. Ward was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.
External links
- A. Ward Samuel A. Ward at the Songwriters Hall of Fame
- Free scores by Samuel A. Ward at the International Music Score Library Project
- Free scores by Samuel A. Ward in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
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- Use mdy dates from November 2011
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- Articles with unsourced statements from March 2007
- 1847 births
- 1903 deaths
- Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees
- American classical organists
- Romantic composers
- American male classical composers
- American classical composers
- Musicians from Newark, New Jersey
- Burials at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Newark
- Burials in New Jersey
- 19th-century American musicians
- American composer, 19th-century birth stubs
- American keyboardist stubs
