walking upstream…
In the winter of 1867, an Elkhorn, Wisconsin druggist named Sanford Fillmore Bennett looked up from his counter to see his friend, the composer Joseph Philbrick Webster, walk in with his violin under his arm and a dark mood on him. Asked what troubled him, Webster shrugged: "It will be all right in the sweet by and by." Bennett wrote the phrase down; the words, he said later, "came like a revelation." Webster hummed out a tune before he had even lifted his bow. Born near Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1819, Webster had taught himself violin as a boy, then spent three formal years training in Boston in the early 1840s before bronchitis cost him his own singing voice and turned him, permanently, into a tune-writer for other men's words — a debt to that Boston schooling that outlasted every ballad he ever set to paper.
In 1840, twenty-one-year-old Webster left Pembroke Academy in New Hampshire for a three-year course at the Boston Academy of Music, the country's first institution built for systematic music education, run by Lowell Mason, one of its founders and the era's dominant reformer of American congregational singing. One archive hedges that Webster studied "possibly with" Mason personally rather than only his curriculum, while naming his co-teachers without qualification; other sources, including Wikipedia's own cited source, name Mason outright. Either way, the training held: Webster was still writing by Mason's method twenty-eight years later.
listen forNothing here can be cued up — Mason and Webster both died before anyone could record a hymn tune. What survives is the printed music, and reference sources describe exactly the discipline the Boston Academy drilled into its students: melodies that stay "tonal" and "avoid modulation and chromaticism," built to be caught by an untrained ear on first hearing. "In the Sweet By-and-By" is that training at its most complete — a verse resolving into the same four-line refrain each time, the shape Mason's singing-school method existed to produce.
Webb's name never arrives alone — every source naming Webster's Boston teachers names him alongside Mason, from the same three-year course, without singling out which man taught what. Webb taught on the Academy's faculty as Mason's protege and close collaborator — their families later intermarried — and built his own reputation as a hymn-tune composer; the melody he wrote at sea, crossing from England, later carried the words "Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus" into hymnals that still print it. By every account the two men's teaching arrived as one program, not two competing lessons.
listen forNo recording of either man survives to compare — Webb died in 1887, Webster in 1875, both decades short of a phonograph. What their shared Boston training produced can still be read off the page: biographers describe Webster's songs as tonal and strophic, free of chromatic surprise, a formula built for congregations in "In the Sweet By-and-By." "Lorena," the 1857 parlor ballad that became a Civil War favorite on both sides, runs that identical plain, singable melodic language toward heartbreak instead of scripture — proof the schooling traveled with him past the hymnal.
Baker's connection to Webster rests on one hard fact: in 1844, while he taught voice in Boston's public schools, having succeeded Mason there in 1841, Webster dedicated a new song, "There's a Change in the Things I Love," to him by name. Baker's career bears out the fit — he ran a private music school from 1851 built around vocal classes and taught voice at Boston's Federal Street Church. One trait later biographers agree Webster carried out of Boston was a fussiness about how words sang: a county historian recorded he demanded only that a lyric's "harsh consonantal sounds should be filed to smoothness."
listen forNothing survives to play — Baker's voice classes and Webster's 1844 dedication both predate recording by half a century. What's traceable is the habit a vocal-technique teacher leaves behind: reference sources describe Webster's melodies as simple, strophic, and built around plain tonic-and-dominant harmony rather than anything a singer would need training to manage. "There's a Change in the Things I Love" is the earliest surviving proof of that habit, written the same year Baker's name went on the dedication page.