This hymn has been called the oldest Lutheran hymn of praise. Johann Gramann (1487–1541) wrote it as Nun lob, mein Seel, den Herren, and its significance lies partly in what it does not do. Most of Luther’s early hymns teach doctrine. Gramann instead wrote a close paraphrase of Psalm 103:1–6, following the psalm’s own movement: it begins by summoning the singer’s own soul to praise the Creator for His mercies and ends by calling all who hear His Word to bless the Lord. The tune was most likely composed by Johann Kugelmann, who came to Königsberg in 1524, a year before Gramann arrived. It did not begin life as a simple congregational melody. Kugelmann first set it inside an eight-voice polyphonic work, treating the tune as a canon at the fifth with the melody in the tenor. Catherine Winkworth (1827–78), the granddaughter of an evangelical Anglican clergyman and the translator of several hundred German hymns, gave us the English text in her Chorale Book for England of 1863, where it opened “My soul, now praise thy Maker.”