In Memoriam: Karen Lynn Davidson

Historian, hymn writer, and educator Karen Lynn Davidson passed away on October 14, 2019, after a long struggle with pancreatic cancer. She wrote the texts for two of the hymns in the 1985 LDS hymnal, and was a scholar of LDS hymns. She co-wrote two books on Eliza R. Snow (a collection of her poetry and a biography), and she was a co-editor of two volumes of The Joseph Smith Papers. She was twice honored with the Mormon Historical Association’s Best Documentary Editing / Bibliography Award, in 2010 (for Eliza R. Snow: The Complete Poetry) and in 2013 (for The Joseph Smith Papers: Histories).

Davidson was born in 1943 in Southern California. She earned her bachelor’s (1964) and master’s degrees (1966) in English from Brigham Young University and her PhD (1973) from the University of Southern California, where she used computers to analyze the prosody of medieval poets. She did post-doctoral research at the Cambridge University and the University of Chicago. She taught for a time in the English Department of Brigham Young University, and was the director of the Honors Program there. From 1983 she taught at Glendale Community College in California, and later was on the English faculty at Mayfield Senior School, a preparatory girls’ school in Pasadena, California. She was married to David A. Davidson, who passed away in 2016.

Davidson served as a member of the LDS Church’s General Church Music Committee during the preparation of Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (1985), and she wrote the text to two hymns that appear in that collection: “Each Life That Touches Ours for Good” and “O Savior, Thou Who Wearest a Crown.” The first of those was anthologized in the 1989 poetry collection Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems. Her 1988 book Our Latter-Day Hymns: The Stories and the Messages told the history of LDS hymnals, as well as specific stories of the hymns in the 1985 hymnal. Karen played the violin, including with the Orchestra at Temple Square.

Karen was a founding member of the Association for Mormon Letters in 1976, and served on its board in 1979-1982. She gave presentations at three AML conferences from 1980 to 1983 (two of which were late published in Dialogue), and helped to organize the 1983 AML West Coast Symposium.

Bibliography

Robert J. Dilligan and Karen Lynn. “Computers and the History of Prosody”. College English. 34:8, May, 1973.

Karen Lynn. “Computational Prosodics: The Decasyllabic Line from Chaucer to Skelton”. University of Southern California, PhD Dissertation, June 1973.

Karen Lynn. “Chaucer’s ‘Underweighted’ Line: Some Computer-Assisted Steps Toward Reassessment,” Deseret Language and Linguistic Society Symposium: 1:1 , Article 7. 1975.

Karen Lynn. “Our LDS Hymn Texts: A Look at the Past; Some Thoughts for the Future”. Dialogue 10:1, Spring 1975/1976.

Karen Lynn. “Closed and Open Doors, Or the Day I Stuck Myself with My…Needle and Found Out I Was Real”. Exponent II, 3:1, 1976.

Karen Lynn. “Chaucer’s Decasyllabic Line: The Myth of the Hundred-Year Hibernation” The Chaucer Review. Vol. 13, No. 2 (Fall, 1978).

Karen Lynn. “The Mormon Sacred and the Mormon Profane: An Aesthetic Dilemma” in Stephen P. Sondrup, ed. Arts and Inspiration: Mormon Perspectives. Brigham Young University Press, 1980.

Karen Lynn. Review of Bread and Milk and Other Stories, by Eileen Gibbons Kump. BYU Studies, 21:3, Summer 1981.

Karen Lynn. “A Feminist Looks at Polygamy” (Review of Real Property, by Sara Davidson). Dialogue 14:1, Spring 1981.

Karen Lynn. “Carboard Utopia”. Sunstone Review, 1:1, July/August 1981.

Karen Lynn. “Sensational Virtue: Nineteenth-Century Mormon Fiction and American Popular Taste.” Dialogue 14:3, Fall 1981.

Karen Lynn. “Singing Praise: The LDS and RLDS Hymnals”. AML Annual, 2013.

Karen Lynn, “The 1981 RLDS Hymnal: Songs More Brightly Sung,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 16:4, Winter 1983.

Karen Lynn. “Measuring the Achievement of the New LDS Hymnal”. Mormon Letters Annual, 1984.

Karen Lynn. “Hope and Hesitation: A review of Greening Wheat”. Sunstone, 10:1, January 1985.

Karen Lynn Davidson. Our Latter-Day Hymns: The Stories and the Messages. Deseret Book Company, 1988. Revised and enlarged in 2009.

Karen Lynn Davidson. “Peer Pressure and the Truly Adult Woman,” In A Heritage of Faith: Talks Selected from the BYU Women’s Conference. Deseret Book, 1988.

Karen Lynn Davidson. “Shipboard surprises and shoreline gleanings.” In Women and the Power Within. Deseret Book, 1991. A talk from the 1990 BYU Women’s Conference.

Noel A. Carmack and Karen Lynn Davidson, editors. Out of the Black Patch: The Autobiography of Effie Marquess Carmack, Folk Musician, Artist, and Writer. Utah State University Press, 1999.

Karen Lynn Davidson. “Choose Your Words” The New Era, Sept. 1999. How to write a poem that can be a good hymn. The seven habits of highly successful hymn writers.

Karen Lynn Davidson, “The Book of Mormon in Latter-day Saint Hymnody,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 9:1, 2000.

Karen Lynn Davidson. “Tribute to Eugene England”. Irreantum 3:3, Autumn 2001.

Karen Lynn Davidson and Jill Mulvay Derr. Eliza R. Snow: The Complete Poetry. Brigham Young University Press and University of Utah Press, 2009.  Mormon Historical Association’s Best Documentary Editing / Bibliography Award.

Karen Lynn Davidson. Thriving on Our Differences: A book for LDS women who feel like outsiders. Deseret Book, 2010.

Karen was co-editor on two volumes of The Joseph Smith Papers, for which she and her co-editors won the Mormon Historical Association’s Best Documentary Editing / Bibliography Award.

Karen Lynn Davidson, David J. Whittaker, Mark Ashurt-McGee, and Richard L. Jensen, The Joseph Smith Papers: Histories, Volume 1: Joseph Smith Histories, 1832-1844. The Church Historian’s Press, 2012.

Karen Lynn Davidson, Richard L. Jensen, and David J. Whittaker, eds., The Joseph Smith Papers: Histories, Volume 2: Assigned Histories, 1831-1847. The Church Historian’s Press, 2012.

Karen Lynn Davidson and Jill Mulvay Derr. Eliza: The Life and Faith of Eliza R. Snow. Deseret Book, 2014.