A. Catherine Hankey wrote 'Tell Me the Old, Old Story' in January 1866, recovering from a serious illness in London. She had written 'I Love to Tell the Story' several months earlier; the two hymns are companion pieces from a single long poem called 'The Old, Old Story,' the first part of which is titled 'The Story Wanted' and the second 'The Story Told.' Together they represent one of the most complete poetic theologies of evangelism in the Victorian hymnodic tradition.
Where 'I Love to Tell the Story' speaks from the perspective of the one who joyfully proclaims the gospel, 'Tell Me the Old, Old Story' speaks from the perspective of the one longing to receive it. This shift is theologically significant: Hankey understood that the evangelical impulse requires not just willing speakers but willing hearers, and that the deepest spiritual need is not for new theological discoveries but for the repeated, simple proclamation of what has always been true.
The song's central biblical source is 1 Corinthians 2:2 - 'I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.' Paul's deliberate narrowing of his message to the Corinthians reflects a conviction that the sophistication and wisdom the Corinthians prized - their rhetorical education, their philosophical debates, their spiritual credentials - were not what they most needed. What they needed was the 'old, old story' of Christ crucified, which Paul calls 'foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God' (1 Cor. 1:18).
The paradox that Paul and Hankey both identify is that the oldest story is also always the newest: it must be received fresh in each generation, heard with the ears of the present need rather than the accumulated assumptions of tradition. The plaintive request 'tell me the old, old story' is not the request of someone ignorant of the facts; it is the request of someone who knows the facts intellectually but needs to hear them again with the heart open.
Acts 4:12 - 'Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved' - provides the evangelical exclusivity that makes the 'old, old story' irreplaceable by any new story. If salvation is available in only one place, then the proclamation of that place is not an optional supplement to other activities but the most urgently necessary communication human beings can undertake. This is the theological ground for the Victorian missionary enterprise in which Hankey was deeply invested.
Luke 24:19 - the question about Jesus of Nazareth, 'a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people' - represents the ongoing human question about Jesus that each generation must answer for itself. The disciples on the Emmaus Road were still processing the events of the Passion and Resurrection; they needed Jesus himself to walk with them and explain what had happened. The hymn voices that same need: tell me the story of Jesus and what he has done, because I am still processing it, still walking toward Emmaus, still needing to have my heart burn within me as the story is unfolded.
William Howard Doane composed the tune, which gave the hymn the wistful, flowing melody inseparably associated with the words. Doane, a Connecticut businessman who composed hymn tunes as a hobby, had an instinctive gift for melodies that matched text rhythm perfectly and that lodge themselves in memory after a single hearing. His setting of Hankey's words has the quality of a lullaby - gentle, rocking, consolatory - appropriate for a text that speaks of spiritual hunger and the longing for the simplest nourishment.