Phoebe Knapp (née Palmer; March 9, 1839 – July 10, 1908) was an American composer of music for hymns and an organist. She composed the music for over five hundred hymns.
Knapp was born in New York City. Her parents were Walter C. Palmer and Phoebe (Worrall) Palmer. She married Joseph Fairchild Knapp, one of the founders and the second president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. He had a pipe organ installed in their apartment. Notably, her husband copyrighted all of the tunes she composed as she wrote them.
She and her husband were members of the John Street Methodist Episcopal Church in New York City. The hymn writer Fanny Crosby was also a member of that church and a friend of Palmer.
She wrote over 500 hymn tunes. The most enduring melody she composed is that of the 1873 hymn "Blessed Assurance," for which Fanny Crosby wrote the text. Knapp and Crosby also collaborated on the Palm Sunday hymn "Open the Gates of the Temple." Another hymn by Fanny Crosby for which Knapp wrote the music is "Nearer the Cross."
Other hymn tunes by Knapp include "Albertson," the tune for "Jesus Christ is Passing By" by J. Denham Smith, and for "When My Love to Christ Grows Weak" by John R. Wreford. Her tune "Consecration" has been matched to "My Spirit Soul and Body" by Mary Dagworthy James. Phoebe Palmer Knapp also wrote sacred choral and solo works.
Works by or about Phoebe Knapp at the Internet Archive
MIDI files of some of her hymns at Cyber Hymnal Archived 2012-04-01 at the Wayback Machine
Free MP3 file of Blessed Assurance at HymnsWithoutWords Archived 2018-03-17 at the Wayback Machine
The Mutopia Project has compositions by Phoebe Knapp