The Lord's My Shepherd

Lyrics

The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want.
He makes me down to lie
In pastures green: he leadeth me
The quiet waters by.

My soul he doth restore again;
And me to walk doth make
Within the paths of righteousness,
Ev'n for his own name's sake.

Yea, though I walk in death's dark vale,
Yet will I fear none ill:
For thou art with me; and thy rod
And staff me comfort still.

My table thou hast furnishèd
In presence of my foes;
My head thou dost with oil anoint,
And my cup overflows.

Goodness and mercy all my life
Shall surely follow me,
And in God's house forever more
My dwelling place shall be.

History

"The Lord's My Shepherd, I'll Not Want" is the best-known metrical setting of Psalm 23, first printed in the Scottish Psalter of 1650 ("The Psalms of David in Meeter", Edinburgh). Its roots reach back further: the English Puritan MP and Provost of Eton, Francis Rous, produced his own paraphrase of the Psalms in 1638 and again in 1641, drawing on earlier Elizabethan psalters by Thomas Norton and William Whittingham. Parliament approved a revised Rous psalter for general use in 1643 and referred it to the Westminster Assembly of Divines; the House of Commons formally accepted a further-revised text in April 1646, though the House of Lords never confirmed it.

Scottish commissioners brought this 1646 Rous text to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in January 1647, and a Scottish revision committee (John Adamson, Thomas Crawford, John Row and John Nevay) reworked it further, drawing also on William Mure's unpublished psalter and Zachary Boyd's Psalmes of David in Meeter (1646, revised 1648). It was Boyd's 1648 revision that supplied the opening line that became famous — "The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want / He makes me down to ly." The Assembly approved the finished text on 23 November 1649 for publication in 1650. The psalm as sung today is therefore a composite, drawing on Rous, Norton, Whittingham, Mure, Boyd and the Kirk's own committee — only a small fraction of Rous's own original wording survives in the final text, which is why he is credited as a source rather than sole author.

Written in common metre (8.6.8.6), the psalm has since appeared in hundreds of hymnals and psalters worldwide. The tune most familiar to English-speaking congregations today is CRIMOND, composed around 1871 and generally credited to Jessie Seymour Irvine (harmonised by David Grant) — a pairing that entered wide public memory through its use at Princess Elizabeth's 1947 wedding and subsequent royal occasions.

Performance

This recording, titled "The Lord's My Shepherd | Hymn with Lyrics · St. Martin's Voices" on the channel, is sung by St Martin's Voices; it runs 3 minutes 9 seconds and was published in 2024. Which tune the recording uses is not stated in the video metadata and is left unverified rather than assumed.

Sources: hymnary.org · hymnologyarchive.com · en.wikipedia.org · hymnallibrary.org