Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound). John Newton* (1725-1807).

First published in Olney Hymns (1779) Book I, ‘On select Passages of Scripture’. It had six Common Metre verses with the title ‘Faith’s Review and Expectation’ and a reference to 1 Chronicles 17: 16-17. Here David exclaims in humble wonder at what the prophet, Nathan, has just said about God’s care for him from his early days to his present position as king, a care that would extend to his successors. Newton applies this to his own experience of divine grace. He preached on past mercies and future hopes, using this text, on 1 January 1773 (information from Marylynn Rouse): ‘And David the king came and sat before the Lord, and said, Who am I, O Lord God, and what is mine house, that thou hast brought me hitherto?’ The sermon text was the last part of this verse. This provides the subtext of the first two lines, with the key words being ‘grace’ and ‘wretch’—the antithesis or stark contrast between these two words is even clearer after reading Newton’s sermon notes.

Newton used the term ‘wretch’ repeatedly in his hymns. Overwhelmingly, hymnal editors have retained the word ‘wretch’, even though there has been a temptation to change it. For example, The Hymnal of The Evangelical United Brethren Church (1957) substitutes, ‘That saveth men like me!’. VU: The Hymn and Worship Book of The United Church of Canada (1996) adds an asterisk at the second line with a note that one might sing ‘that saved and strengthened me!’

The concept of ‘grace’ echoes beautifully Ephesians 2:8-9: ‘For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast’. Luke 15 is full of narratives that support the ‘lost/found’ opposition in stanza 1: the parable of the lost sheep (Matthew 18: 12-14; Luke 15: 3-7); the parable of the lost coin (Luke 15: 8-10), and the most famous of all, the return of the prodigal son (Luke 15: 11-32). Likewise, the contrast between ‘blind/see’ is a strong theme in the New Testament.  The touch of Jesus brings sight in several narratives: Matthew 9: 29-30; Mark 8: 22-26; Mark 10: 46-52; John 9: 1-41. Each of these emphasises the power of metaphor which the hymn uses as it describes the spiritual life. 

The hymn may have autobiographical origins, but Carl P. Daw, Jr. counsels:

Although modern readers and singers are more likely to look at this hymn for points of connection with Newton’s own eventful history as a former sailor and slave trader turned Anglican priest and abolitionist, the author himself probably thought of what he had written as an outline of the typical journey from utter despair (1.2, “a wretch like me”) to confident faith (3.4, “grace will lead me home”). That assumption of speaking to a general human condition accounts, at least partly, for the widespread use of this hymn. . . (Daw, 2016, p. 617). 

 

Until recently verbal alterations have been relatively minor but there have been many different selections of stanzas. Newton’s stanza 5 is frequently omitted:

Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
    And mortal life shall cease;
I shall possess, within the vail,
     A life of joy and peace.

Verse 6 is almost always omitted:

The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
    The sun forbear to shine;
But God, who call’d me here below,
    Will be for ever mine.

Less frequently stanzas 2 and/or 3 are omitted or stanzas 3 and 4 appear in reverse order.

The following, from A Collection of Sacred Ballads (1790) and of unknown authorship, is often introduced as the closing verse, especially in the USA (in the 1790 collection it was appended to ‘Jerusalem, my happy home’*); the stanza was first associated with ‘Amazing grace’ in Edwin O. Excell*’s Coronation Hymns for the Church Sunday School (Chicago, 1910):

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
    Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
    Than when we first begun.

Newton’s hymn has an imaginative structure, centred on conversion experience, surveying the speaker’s life with its difficulties, and contemplating both death and the end of the world. All the selections do some damage to this structure. Recently there has been increasing verbal variation. Sing Glory (1999) and Praise! (2000) use the first five stanzas with considerable modernization. Songs of Fellowship (2003) has a worship-song version beginning ‘Amazing love has come to me’ and adding a chorus by Nathan Fellingham. A version by Chris Tomlin* with the refrain ‘My chains are gone’ is popular in the United States. In Britain A&MCP and A&MRW, however, print all six of Newton’s stanzas as written, thus restoring the hymn’s balance and the eschatology of the original conclusion. 

The combination of words and tune contributed to the hymn’s remarkable revival in the 1960s, when it was taken up by a pipe band and by various popular singers, sometimes in secular contexts. ‘Amazing grace’ now appears in very many major British, American, Canadian and Australian hymnals.

The text was first paired with a variety of tunes including ARLINGTON, WARWICK, HEBER, and BELMONT in hundreds of books. The tune that we know first appeared in two different versions in the Columbian Harmony (Cincinnati, 1829) edited by Benjamin Shaw and Charles H. Spilman, with the tune names St. Mary’s and GALLAHER. Later collections picked up the tune, but paired its frequently used Common Meter (8.6.8.6) structure to other texts, such as in the Virginia Harmony (1831) where it was named HARMONY GROVE. Finally, William Walker* (1809-1875) paired the tune with Newton’s text in Southern Harmony* (New Haven, 1835) under the name NEW BRITAIN. Edwin O. Excell, the same composer who solidified the use of the alternative final stanza to the hymn, included the tune under the title AMAZING GRACE in his collection Make His Praise Glorious (1900). The arrangement of the tune that is found in many current hymnals first appeared in Coronation Hymns (1910). UMH (1989) uses the harmonization found in the first (1900) of Excell’s two collections. It was not until the 1960s that AMAZING GRACE (NEW BRITAIN) was accepted as the primary tune associated with this text beyond the United States.

President Obama sang the first stanza of ‘Amazing Grace’ at the meeting to honor those who were killed on 17 June 2015 in the Charleston church shooting by a young white supremacist who killed nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN05jVNBs64.). Words cannot describe the power of this hymn sung by the first African-American president in a city where the sale of enslaved Africans was once a common commercial transaction. It was commemorated by Zoe Mulford in the wonderful song ‘The President sang Amazing Grace’. See https://zoemulford.com/the-story-of-the-president-sang-amazing-grace.

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Elizabeth Cosnett/cmh

[Note: for detailed information on the tune, see the entry by William J. Reynolds in Handbook to the Baptist Hymnal [1991] (Nashville, Tennessee, 1992), p. 92; and that by Robin A. Leaver and Marion Hatchett in The Hymnal 1982 Companion Volume 3B (New York, 1994), pp. 1236-43. In this volume a facsimile of the shape-note tune is at p. 1239, and a facsimile of William Walker's tune, from the 1854 edition of Southern Harmony is at p. 1241.] 

Further Reading

  1. Steve Turner, Amazing Grace: The story of America's most beloved song (New York, 2002), includes comprehensive bibliography and sources.
  2. Carl P. Daw, Jr., Glory to God. A Companion (Louisville, Kentucky, 2016).
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