Carl Boberg was born on 16 August 1859 in Mönsterås on Sweden's Kalmar Sound. In 1885, aged 26, he was caught in a violent thunderstorm walking home from a Kronoberg County church meeting; the storm was followed by a stillness broken only by birds and a distant church bell. That night he wrote the nine stanzas of 'O Store Gud', published the following March in the newspaper Sanningsvittnet ("Witness of the Truth").
The text was set anonymously to an old Swedish folk melody and drifted eastward — translated into German by Manfred von Glehn in 1907, into Russian by Ivan S. Prokhanov in 1912, and into Ukrainian in the 1920s.
The English missionary Stuart K. Hine and his wife Edith encountered the Russian version while working in the Carpathian mountains of western Ukraine in the 1930s. Hine translated three stanzas as he heard them, then wrote a fourth of his own in 1948 after ministering to Russian prisoners-of-war awaiting repatriation from Britain. He published the completed 'How Great Thou Art' in his own gospel-song leaflet Grace and Peace in 1949.
The hymn reached the United States when George Beverly Shea sang it at the Billy Graham London Harringay crusade in 1954, and again at the 1957 Madison Square Garden crusade. By the 1970s it was the second-most-loved hymn in the English-speaking world after 'Amazing Grace', and remains the signature closing song of every Graham association crusade recording.