Edwin O. Excell

E. O. Excell (December 13, 1851 – June 10, 1921) was a prominent American publisher, composer, song leader, and singer of music for church, Sunday school, and evangelistic meetings during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His 1909 stanza selection and arrangement of "Amazing Grace" became the most widely used and familiar setting of that hymn by the second half of the twentieth century. Excell compiled or contributed to about ninety secular and sacred song books and is estimated to have written, composed, or arranged more than two thousand of the songs he published. The music publishing business he started in 1881 and that eventually bore his name was the highest volume producer of hymnbooks in America at the time of his death.