Beautiful Isle of Somewhere

"Beautiful Isle of Somewhere" is a song with words by Jessie Brown Pounds and music by John Sylvester Fearis, written in 1897.

In 1901, the song was sung by a quartet of young ladies at the beginning of McKinley's funeral in the First Methodist Episcopal Church in his hometown of Canton, Ohio.

"[9] The Seventh-day Adventist publication Signs of the Times concurred with the future U. S. president, listing it among songs "inexpressibly weak and shallow".

[9] In 1927, William Henry O'Connell, the Catholic Archbishop of Boston, banned the use of the tune in funerals, calling the hymn "inane" and "trashy."

Cardinal O'Connell was concerned it was among a group of songs composed by authors whose "maudlin sentiment" overshadowed their faith.

[13] A 1928 Lutheran publication used O'Connell's exact words[14] when it described the song as a "sob-producer" that was a "flagrant outrage to faith and the ritual.