Frank and Anne Warner also recorded a landmark version of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” when they visited an African American woman named Sue Thomas in Elizabeth City.
Frank had originally met Sue Thomas at Nags Head on the Outer Banks in the early 1930s or maybe as early as the 1920s.
At that time, he was visiting the old beach resort at Nags Head— in those days, Nags Head was the
only resort on the Outer Banks, believe it or not. While he was there, Frank stayed at the Arlington Hotel, a fisherman’s boardinghouse on the south end of the beach.
Sue Thomas resided in Elizabeth City, but in the summers she took the ferry to Nags Head and was the Arlington’s cook. (She had to take the ferry—there were no bridges from the mainland to the Outer Banks yet.)
At the Arlington, Frank and Sue discovered their mutual love of old hymns and folk songs. After she finished in the kitchen at night, she would come out on the porch and they’d sing and play together.
Frank played the guitar, and Sue had a lovely voice, full of sweetness and deep feeling.
One of the songs she taught him was “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”
The song was an African American spiritual, sung in those days with reverence and a commanding sense of all-embracing consolation.
In the song, after all, God makes room in his hands for the “crap-shootin’ man” and the “back-sliding’ sister.” You’d have to figure God might have room for the likes of you and me, too.
Edward Boatner (1898-1991), composer, baritone and educator.
Much later, most performers added a faster beat and hand clapping, making it seem less like a hymn. That’s usually how the song is sung today.
While possibly quite old, the song wasn’t known widely in the 1930s. When she did her research on the song’s origins, Anne Warner found only one previous version in print.
That was in a book of spirituals and other hymns called “Spirituals Triumphant, Old and New,” that was compiled by
Edward Boatner, an important African American composer from New Orleans. He was assisted by
Willa A. Townsend, a hymnologist and music director in Nashville, Tenn., where the collection was published in 1927.
Boatner and Townsend solidified the song’s place in the canon of African American spirituals. To a powerful degree, Sue Thomas and the Warners would help take the song beyond the church and to the rest of the world.
Frank Warner and Sue Thomas, Nags Head, N.C., ca. 1933. From the Frank and Anne Warner Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University
