In October 1932, thirty-three years after writing his best-known hymn, Lewis Edgar Jones answered a letter from fellow hymn compiler Haldor Lillenas with the only account of his own songwriting process that survives: "a great many [of my songs] came from sentences in a pastor's sermons... I remember that Power in the Blood was written during a camp meeting at Mountain Lake Park, Maryland." He never named that preacher — no source ever has. Born in Yates City, Illinois, in 1865 and raised on an Iowa farm, Jones trained at Chicago's Moody Bible Institute, where Billy Sunday graduated the same class, then spent thirty-six years as a YMCA secretary in Iowa, Texas, and California. Hymn writing, over 200 songs under his own name and pseudonyms, was strictly his hobby. He died in Santa Barbara in 1936, having outlived the memory of whichever sermon started it all.