Each Step I Take -- W. Elmo Mercer

He was still just a teenager, but he had a job nevertheless. In fact, he’d already been at his life’s work for several years before he actually started collecting a paycheck. William Elmo Mercer must have felt someone’s hand upon his shoulder, and so he wrote about his feelings when he composed “Each Step I Take” in the early 1950’s. Perhaps he was thinking about how he envisioned the journey he had barely begun. He may have also been feeling he needed a hand getting out of a trough. So he wrote, as a kind of therapy. Is Elmo’s song good medicine for you?

Elmo Mercer’s career as a composer began when he was just a boy, and has continued over some 60 years and hundreds of songs. Though he never went to college for formal training, he had plenty of teaching and opportunities to grow his musicianship before he graduated from high school. He’d had piano lessons and was a church pianist by the time he was 13 years old, and tried his hand at composing by 14, so one could say he was an advanced learner. This precocious kid took a job with the Nashville, Tennessee-based Benson Publishing Company as a writer by the time he was 19, a time when he also wrote “Each Step I Take” (The Tennessee flag is shown here, as Elmo made this his home for so many years).

One might think he was feeling the wind in his sails, that everything was taking off for this young prodigy. But, it’s also said that young Elmo was writing what he felt deeply in those years, so while verse one sounds like everything was great, verse two’s ‘waver(-ing) faith’ and a ‘chasm’ opening before him, and verse 3’s reliance on Him ‘come what may’ tell a different tale. He was in a gloomy place, apparently, and was relating how he maintained equilibrium then. It’s a song that’s perhaps his most well-known still, some 60 years later, probably because its message about walking with divine guidance is appropriate no matter in what stage of life one finds himself. But, as a young fellow just beginning something, could it also be that this inspiration was given providentially to Elmo, kind of like a compass for a sailor? ‘Here’s how you do it for the next 60 years, son’, you might hear Him saying to young Elmo Mercer. Some 1,600 songs later, Elmo’s still at it, too.

Though Elmo’s no longer working for Benson, he hasn’t stopped working for the one that put the song in his soul 60 years ago. It’s said that Elmo still uses his writing pen some, and maintains connections with the Park Avenue Baptist Church in Nashville, where his piano-playing echoes his beginnings as a youngster. It’s reported that he and his wife Marcia begin their concerts with “We’ve Come to Lift Up Jesus”, kind of the same sentiment that Elmo must have been feeling in the early 1950’s as he thought about his steps in God’s shadow.  It seems Elmo is still taking the same steps he wrote about long ago…maybe that’s the therapy. Keep taking the same steps.

The following sources provided background for this story:

 Stories Behind Popular Songs and Hymns, by Lindsay Terry, Baker Book House 1990 and 1992.

http://www.elmomercermusic.com/bio.html

http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/m/e/r/mercer_we.htm

http://www.fredbock.com/Promo.asp?page=262