The hymn was “In the Garden,” written by C. Austin Miles in 1912. Anne Murray first heard it as a child of eight or nine, sitting in a Presbyterian church with her grandparents. More than four decades later, she recorded it for What a Wonderful World, the 1999 album that became the only Anne Murray record to reach No. 1 on any American album chart.
A Catholic girl in a Presbyterian church
Anne Murray grew up in the coal-mining town of Springhill, Nova Scotia. Her family’s faith was Catholic, and the church music she knew as a child was sung in Latin. In 2002, she put it plainly:
“Hymns weren’t part of my life because I was raised Catholic, singing in Latin.”
That is what makes one Sunday morning stand out. Years later, introducing “In the Garden” from a concert stage, she told the audience where she first heard it:
“When I was just a little girl of about eight or nine, I went to a Presbyterian church with my grandparents. They sang a hymn that morning which was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. It’s never left me.”
The hymn she heard that morning
“In the Garden” was not written about a flower garden. According to C. Austin Miles’s own account, he was sitting in the darkroom where he kept his photography equipment and his organ in the spring of 1912 when he opened his Bible to John 20, his favorite chapter. That is the passage where Mary Magdalene, weeping at the empty tomb, turns and finds Jesus standing there, mistaking him at first for the gardener.
Miles said he felt as if he were standing in the scene himself. He wrote the words as fast as they came, and that same evening he wrote the music. The “I” who comes to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses, is Mary on that first Easter morning.
An album she would only make her own way
By 1999, Anne Murray had spent three decades on the radio. When it came time for her first inspirational album, the people behind the project wanted something specific. As she recalled in a 2003 interview, “they wanted a whole album of Protestant hymns.” Her answer:
“That didn’t feel honest to me.”
She also said she didn’t want to look like she was jumping on the gospel bandwagon just because gospel records were selling well. So she built a different kind of album, mixing songs with an uplifting message, like “Lean On Me” and Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” with the old hymns.
The hymns still had a place, and “In the Garden” was one of them, alongside “Amazing Grace,” “The Old Rugged Cross” and “How Great Thou Art.” Anne Murray said she approached the hymns as new material, and that she found herself “really quite moved.”
What happened next
What a Wonderful World, a 26-song, two-disc set co-produced by Anne Murray and Tommy West, came out on October 19, 1999. It climbed to No. 1 on Billboard’s Christian Albums chart, reached No. 4 on Top Country Albums and No. 38 on the Billboard 200. It went gold in the United States in 2000 and was certified platinum in 2002.
For a singer with so many No. 1 singles, it was the first and only time one of her albums topped an American chart.
She took the songs on stage too. The concert film Anne Murray: What a Wonderful World includes “In the Garden,” and it was in a live performance of the hymn that she shared the story of that Sunday with her grandparents.
In 2016, when her inspirational recordings were gathered on Amazing Grace: Inspirational Favorites and Classic Hymns, “In the Garden” was there again, still in the voice of the Catholic girl who first heard it from a Presbyterian pew.