“Forever His Blood” was written by Kenny Beck and Jeff Nelson. This version was produced by Jeff Nelson of Nashville and features solo artist Luke Brown.
This version is a choral arrangement preferred by many churches.
The Story of Forever His Blood
On the morning of December 2nd, 2013, highly unusual circumstances motivated me to write a Christian song based on Colossians 1:13-14. The words were done by breakfast, the tune done by lunch, since I had to teach lot of piano lessons that afternoon.
That night after lessons, I told my wife that I had written a Christian song. To say she was shocked would be an understatement. But, she listened to it, and said: “That’s not nothing”, and quickly added “but you can’t rhyme price with price”. She and I quickly fixed that errant rhyme, and “Forever His Blood” was essentially done.
The next Sunday, I announced to the adult Sunday School class which I teach that I had written a Christian song. Again, everyone looked at me dumbfounded. A few people haltingly took just a few of the 10 copies that I had printed out on yellow paper. By that evening, some of those SS people had contacted me and said, “Hey, we really love FHB! It’s really catchy. We’ve been playing it on our guitars all afternoon.”
From there the FHB circle widened further in my church with many folks again expressing a strong like for the little song.
But gradually during 2014, FHB got lost in the hustle and bustle of life and ended up buried in a pile of music on top of my piano.
In December of 2014, while I was preparing a Sunday School lesson, I ran into the story behind “Hark The Herald Angels Sing”. Basically, Charles Wesley’s original words were majorly tweaked by George Whitfield and “Hark” ended up becoming one of the most popular Christmas carols ever. I thought, hmmm, maybe get my song-writer pal in Nashville, Jeff Nelson, to tweak FHB, and maybe it might amount to something in the Christian song world. So I found FHB buried near the bottom of a pile of music and sent a yellow copy off to Jeff Nelson.
In January 2015, Jeff was excited to tweak and produce FHB. Within a couple of months, the FHB project was done. If you tried to divvy up this truly collaborative effort, you might come up with 60% Kenny and 40% Jeff. FHB was then released on you-tube on June 8th, 2015.
In July of 2015, I began to “pitch” FHB directly to churches via email. Quite a few liked it, and ended up asking for the music, and ended up doing it. The conservative guesstimate is that approximately 40 churches did this, mostly in Texas, but also across the south, and even 2 in Australia. Along the way, we had to produce both choral and orchestral versions because many churches asked for them.
In October of 2015, some highly unusual coincidental circumstances, led me to “accidentally” pitch FHB to one of Jeff’s contacts at LIFEWAY Publishing. Jeff’s contact at LIFEWAY got back with me the very same day expressing a very strong like for the song. The publishing wheels at LIFEWAY do indeed turn very slowly and carefully, but one year later, in October of 2016, our contact excitedly told us that LIFEWAY was going to publish FHB under their Glory Songs Label in Sept 2017. LIFEWAY’s Glory Songs are marketed to mostly small and medium size churches.
Since being released, sales of FHB have been decent. I can only assume that quite a few churches across the USA are singing and loving FHB.
LIFEWAY now wants to put FHB up for consideration in their Easter Songs Label next year. FHB was not written with Easter in mind. Nevertheless, over the past 2 years, some churches have viewed it that way and have used it as an Easter special.
Where FHB goes from here, only God knows. But it has been liked and enjoyed by an ever widening circle of people.