CAMPBELL, Lucie Eddie

Lucie Eddie Campbell was an American composer and director of gospel music. She consistently innovated in the conventions of gospel songs and hymns; her 1919 "Something within" is considered the first published first gospel song by an African-American.

At age nineteen, Campbell organized a group of Beale Street musicians into the Music Club. Other members were later added to form a thousand-voice choir that performed at the National Baptist Convention. At the organizational meeting of the National Sunday and Baptist Training Union Congress held in Memphis in 1915, "Miss Lucie" was elected as music director. She penned songs for the Congress and wrote musical pageants exhorting the young to give their lives to Christian service.

In 1919, Campbell published her first song, "Something Within", which was followed by more than one hundred others. The core of "He'll Say Well Done", written in 1933, was covered as "End of My Journey" by various artists over the decades, including The Rebels with Jim Hamill, Hank Snow, Johnny Cash, The Famous Davis Sisters of Philadelphia, Delores "Mom" Winans, Ferlin Husky, the duet of Donald Vails and Debbie Steele Hayden, and Ernest Tubb, among many others.