Parry's friend Robert Bridges suggested William Blake's verses beginning with the text "And did those feet in ancient time," asking Parry to supply the verse with "suitable, simple music that an audience could take up and join in" for a meeting in 1916 of the Fight for Right propaganda movement in Queen's Hall. Parry presented Walford Davies, the organist for the event, with the music for Jerusalem, saying, "Here's a tune for you old chap. Do what you like with it." Two years later Parry included the setting in the Albert Hall concert to celebrate the Votes for Women campaign he and his wife avidly supported. Parry arranged his unison song with an accompaniment for standard orchestra for this occasion. Later, after Parry's death in 1918, Edward Elgar reorchestrated the melody for a very large orchestra for the Leeds Festival of 1922. It is in this guise that Jerusalem is best known. Parry originally intended the first stanza to be sung by a solo female voice with massed voices joining in only for the second, yet this is rarely ever the way the work is performed today. Jerusalem has become an unofficial national anthem for England, as it is sung as an enduing tradition at the end of every Prom concert during the season and at the end of many other concerts and civic functions throughout England. No one wrote a more telling testimonial to the impact Jerusalem has had on England than Parry's son-in-law, Harry Plunkett Greene, who said, "It is said that the greatest benefactor of a country is the man who writes its tunes; if he had left us nothing but Jerusalem we could never repay him for what we owe him."

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