Charles E. Ives began compiling his volume of 114 Songs shortly after he suffered a heart attack and learned that he was suffering from diabetes. This was in 1918, when most persons with serious cases of diabetes could not expect to live long. He was a financial success: Around ten years earlier he had co-founded what became America's largest independent insurance agency, and was now a self-made millionaire.

He had gone into business at the advice of his late father, who had counseled that Charlie could not let his family "starve on your dissonances." Charles soon relegated his musical activities to after-hours work. And in terms of getting his music heard and appreciated, he was a failure. Over 25 years he had developed a unique and radically musical vocabulary all his own, with ideas that later composers duplicated or copied, but which leading professionals regarded as crazy.

As it turned out, Ives was spared from an early death because of the development of commercial insulin soon after his diagnosis, but the 114 Songs and its companion volume of the Second Piano Sonata were surely intended as a kind of musical testament. Ives self-published them and distributed them to as many libraries as he could. The songs summarize the development of all aspects of his style except the ones that depend on large numbers of players for their effect. The volume has new and radical songs, and conventional student works. It also has a number of songs that are settings of larger-scale works.

The Camp Meeting is such a song. Its origin was an organ prelude, subsequently lost, called Communion, written in 1900. By 1904, Ives had transformed it and two other preludes into his Symphony no 3, "The Camp Meeting," which would not be heard for another 40 years (at which time it won a Pulitzer Prize in music.) Ives grouped it with three other songs whose origin was in hymn tunes. In the case of this song, these quoted tunes are "Atzmon" and "Woodworth." The song, marked "Largo cantabile," is tonal, and even has the conventional key signature for B flat or d minor, but from the beginning is densely chromatic. There is a lengthy slow introduction in 6/8, which shifts to 9/8 for the voice's entrance. Although it, too, is chromatic, its pacing is calm and stately, though there are usually rapid turns in one or another piano line.

As Ives' philosophical or "transcendental" songs often do, the song builds in strength while the chords become towering and confusing cross-rhythms abound. The music then subsides until it reaches the words "Yielding to His Love," at which time "Woodworth" ("Just as I am with but one plea") enters to a calmer, less complex harmony, save for strange murmuring in an inner voice. The voice remains totally diatonic, and slowly seems to induce the piano to rid itself progressively of the dissonant chromatic notes until it, too, is in a calm B flat major.

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