Sankey Still Sings

The great evangelistic singer, Ira D. Sankey seems to step from the pages of this book and invite you to travel with him from his home town in New Castle, Pennsylvania, to Chicago—to London, Edinburgh, and the Holy Land. Traveling with the dynamic D. L. Moody, Sankey and the evangelist drew thousands to Christ.

Mr. Ludwig has long been an admirer of Mr. Sankey and having waited years for a biography to be written about one of the greatest evangelistic singers known to the world, finally started work on this book. He writes with an interest born of a deep admiration for a great man of God.

The fire and fervor of Sankey's spirit are captured by the author's versatile pen and once again we realize that even as Moody PREACHED the gospel, Sankey SANG the gospel —and throughout the world, even today, Sankey Still Sings.

OTHER than my parents, no people have influenced me so much as Moody and Sankey. From the time I was a small boy attending the Rift Valley Academy in Kenya Colony I have been tremendously interested in them. Since that time, I have read every biography and sermon of Mr. Moody’s that I could lay my hands on. Reading him made me interested in his singer, Ira D. Sankey. I sent to bookstores, searched through secondhand book counters, trying to find a full-length biography of him, but I was always disappointed. I had his autobiography, a short sketch of less than one hundred pages, but I wanted more. When I found that there were no other biographies available, I patiently waited for one to be written. But I waited in vain—none were printed. Still I thought one should be written. I knew that people would be interested in a man whose hymnal is still being reissued in lots of a quarter of a million at a time and has already sold seventy million copies. When no biographies were published, I decided I had waited long enough. This book is the result.

That Sankey is still in people’s minds there can be no doubt. One time while I was still in Kenya, an aged missionary from the Congo came to one of our services. We happened to be singing “Hold the Fort, for I Am Coming,” when he stepped in. He listened to it carefully and asked us to sing it again. We repeated it, but he was not satisfied. We had to sing it five or six times before he would let us sing anything else. When we were through he told us why he liked the chorus so much. It seems that he found Christ in a meeting conducted by Moody and Sankey in London years before. He remembered the chorus and the story Sankey told before he sang it. “I have been singing it ever since,” he said. Then, with glistening eyes, he continued: “Many times when things were hard in the Congo, the chorus came to my lips. It is one of the things that kept me going.” And so, regardless of the fate of this book, Sankey still sings, and he will continue to sing for many generations to come.