A Practical Guide to the Old Rugged Cross Song Lyrics
The Old Rugged Cross was written by George Bennard in 1912 and published in his hymnal Gospel Hymns. It became one of the most recorded hymns in history, with over three million copies sold in its first decade. The song is in the public domain, which means anyone can reproduce, adapt, or record the lyrics without permission or licensing fees. I spent years working in church music coordination, and one of the recurring headaches I dealt with was churches trying to legally use hymnals that contained the song. The simple fix was always the same: print the lyrics from a public domain source and call it done. But people kept overcomplicating it, worrying about copyright when none existed.
The Old Rugged Cross Song Lyrics
Here are the complete original lyrics as Bennard published them: On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,
The emblem of suffering and shame;
And I love that old cross where my Lord was clad,
'Fore he died for our sins in our place.
He bid me carry his cross, oh how I'll glory
Where'er I dwell; 'tis the old rugged cross,
The old rugged cross, so despised of the world,
The dearest treasure my soul possesseth.
'Tis a jewel of price beyond calculation,
For it held the precious One there to die;
Oh, I'll prize the old rugged cross, till my trophies
All faded grow, and my race shall be run. The standard structure is four verses, though many congregations only sing the first two. Bennard wrote additional verses that are less commonly performed today. The original sheet music is available through various public domain archives, and the text is also widely reproduced on sites like Hymnary.org and the Digital Public Library of America.
Here's a practical note that catches people off guard: the meter is 8.7.8.7 D with a refrain, which places it in the common metre family used for songs like "Amazing Grace." If you're arranging this for a choir or band, that means any standard 8.7.8.7 D tune will fit seamlessly. I've seen people try to pair it with completely wrong meters and waste hours of rehearsal time fixing it. One edge case I ran into regularly: people looking to publish a new arrangement of the song would often assume they needed permission for the lyrics too. They didn't. The words are public domain, so you only need to clear the copyright on whatever musical arrangement you're using. A Bach harmonization is free. A 1960s gospel arrangement is not. That distinction matters and trips up everyone at least once. If you want to access the original sheet music directly, Hymnary.org hosts digitized copies from early 20th-century publications. Some archives require a free account to download the PDFs, but the text itself is freely available anywhere. My recommendation is to grab the original version from Hymnary rather than a third-party blog that may have introduced transcription errors. I've caught typos in printed hymnals where "trophies" became "triple's" due to bad OCR scanning.
Get the Full Details
The song has been recorded by an enormous range of artists across genres. Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Roy Rogers, George Jones, and many others all released versions. Each recording interprets the lyrics differently in tempo and key, but the words have remained largely stable since publication. Some contemporary artists have trimmed verses or altered phrasing for radio edits, but the full original text is what you'll find in public domain sources. There is one genuine limitation worth noting: while the lyrics are free, certain modern choral arrangements or translations of the lyrics may carry their own copyright. If a church wants to use a paraphrased version in a service bulletin, they should verify whether that specific translation is under copyright before distributing it widely. The Bennard text itself is safe. Adaptations are not automatically safe.
