Ernest McElwain raised Angus cattle on his farm in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. He also led singing at Horton’s Chapel Church of Christ where my dad preached for a few years back in the Sixties. I remember Bro. McElwain standing at the front of the congregation, patting time on the edge of the hymnal. In the vault of a young boy’s impressions, he was about six feet tall and would have weighed around two hundred and twenty pounds. In actuality, that recollection could be off by a few inches and by several pounds.

What is accurate in that memory is that he had a strong, enthusiastic voice that managed to stay on key regardless of how many followers might have drifted off a bit. He rarely said anything other than to announce the number of the song and identify which male member was to lead the prayer following. Occasionally, he would comment quietly, almost as if to himself upon finishing some hymn, “That is a beautiful song.”

There are two songs so strongly associated with Ernest McElwain that I cannot hear them without thinking of him. One is “Jesus, Lover of My Soul.” I don’t remember hearing anyone else in the fellowship leading that song and I still find something pleasing and remarkable in a west Kentucky farmer taking such obvious delight and comfort in its delicate wordings. The other is “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us.” Though others did indeed lead that song, none did so in a manner that could un-rivet my association of it with him.

It would be good, I think, to make some positive, fine association with the memory of a young person. To have some good thing so firmly entrenched in their mind that the decades of life could not undo it. To be stirred in memory from time to time with such fine associations.

I haven’t seen or spoken to the man in over forty years but whenever I hear that song, I think of him. No matter who is singing, the voice I hear belongs to Ernest McElwain.

H. Arnett
7-20-09