Samuel Augustus Ward (December 28, 1848 – September 28, 1903) was an American organist and

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and Defi ...

. Born in Newark, New Jersey, the son of a shoemaker, he studied under several teachers in New York and became an organist at Grace Episcopal Church in his home town in 1880. He married Virginia Ward in 1871, with whom he had four daughters. He is remembered for the 1882 tune "Materna", which he intended as a setting for the hymn "

O Mother Dear, Jerusalem David Dickson (1583–1663) was a Church of Scotland minister and theologian. Life David Dickson of Busby was born in Glasgow in 1583. He was the son of John Dickson, a wealthy local merchant with premises on the Trongate. He was at first ...

". This was published ten years later, in 1892. In 1903, after Ward had died, the tune was first combined by a publisher with the Katharine Lee Bates poem "America", itself first published in 1895, to create the patriotic song " America the Beautiful." The first book with the combination was published in 1910. Ward never met Bates. Ward was founder and first director of the Orpheus Club of Newark, where he died on September 28, 1903. He is buried in Newark‘s Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Ward was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.

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* * * 1848 births 1903 deaths 19th-century American composers 19th-century American male musicians 20th-century American male musicians American classical composers American classical organists American male classical composers American male organists American Romantic composers Burials at Mount Pleasant Cemetery (Newark, New Jersey) Burials in New Jersey Classical musicians from New Jersey Classical musicians from New York (state) Musicians from Newark, New Jersey Male classical organists 19th-century organists {{US-keyboardist-stub