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Bliss's inspiration for some of his other songs also came from events he heard about or experienced. The title and sense of "Let the Lower Lights Be Burning," for example, came from Dwight L. Moody's moralizing upon a shipwreck said to have occurred near Cleveland, while "Roll on, O Billow of Fire!" was a product of the great Chicago conflagration in which Moody lost his home and two churches with which he was associated.

When he wrote "Hold the Fort" in 1870 Bliss was engaged in holding song conventions and in composing and teaching music. The same year he contributed to a music book for Sunday schools, one of several such books he contributed to or edited in the next few years. He was professionally and financially successful, earning as much as $100 for a four-day convention engagement. After only two weeks in the army at the end of the Civil War, he went to Chicago as a member of a quartet called the Yankee Boys to sing for the music publishers Root & Cady at patriotic meetings. The Yankee Boys failed, but the firm kept Bliss on. For four years he engaged in convention work under an arrangement with his employers, and then he struck out on his own. As suggested by the Yankee Boys interlude, Bliss's first interest was secular music. His first composition was the sad tale of poor departed "Lora Vale," a song which George F. Root arranged and Root & Cady published in 1864: