Amazing Grace: The Story of America's Most Beloved Song
by Steve Turner
Ecco, 2002
266 pp.; $23.95

In May 1731, the English Presbyterian Philip Doddridge wrote to his older colleague in the Nonconformist ministry, Isaac Watts, about a midweek worship service he had recently conducted in a barn for "a pretty large assembly of plain country people." Doddridge's text was from Hebrews 6:12—"That ye be not slothful, but followers of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises." After the sermon Doddridge sang with his humble congregation a hymn by Watts that began,

Give me the wings of faith to rise
Within the veil, and see
The saints above, how great their joys,
How bright their glories be.

The effect of the singing was the occasion for Doddridge's letter: "I had the satisfaction to observe tears in the eyes of several of the auditory, and after the service was over, some of them told me that they were not able to sing, so deeply were their minds affected with it."

Although this incident took place in an out-of-the-way venue with a congregation of no special account, Doddridge was nonetheless registering a sea change in Western Christianity. Ordinary believers had begun to find their voice, and that voice was expressed in song. Doddridge and Watts were both expert contributors to the new evangelical hymnody. Soon they would also be supporting figures like John Wesley, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards who proclaimed that true Christianity meant not just intellectual recognition of Christian dogma or formal acknowledgment of the church, but the experience of repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. Oceans of ink have been spilled in analyzing virtually all aspects of the evangelical movements that arose from that insistence. Only rarely, however, has the significance of song been given its full place in this story. Yet nothing was more central to the evangelical revival than the singing of new hymns written in praise of the goodness, mercy, and grace of God.

Steve Turner's remarkably informative book on what is now the most widely known hymn from the great surge of 18th-century hymn-writing does not argue that larger point explicitly. Yet by showing how emblematic John Newton's hymn, "Amazing Grace," was for Newton's own experience, how fecund it became for expressing the grateful faith of many generations of both black and white Americans, and how the Christian message of the song has not been exhausted even in its recent emergence as an all-purpose icon of undifferentiated hope, Turner hints at that larger picture. His fascinating biography of this one hymn demonstrates, in other words, the deeply affecting force that has consistently been exerted through the years and around the world when the best evangelical verse of the 18th century is set to singable, effective tunes.

Newton wrote "Amazing Grace" in late December 1772, more than 24 years after his conversion at sea during a violent storm in the mid-Atlantic. By 1772 his career as a slave trader was far in the past; for the previous eight years he had been serving as rector of the Anglican church in Olney to the north of London. In that position, he carried out an energetic ministry as teacher, itinerant gospel preacher, spiritual correspondent, evangelical networker—and hymnwriter.1 With his friend, the manic poet William Cowper, Newton regularly provided hymns for his congregation keyed to the week's sermon. The text that Newton was preparing for his New Year's service on January 1, 1773, was 1 Chronicles 17:16-17, which introduces a prayer of King David thanking God for bringing him "thus far" in his tumultuous life.

With many lines appropriate to his own experience, Newton presented a hymn of six stanzas to his congregation. The first three are the familiar verses still being sung ("Amazing grace, how sweet the sound … 'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear … Thro' many dangers, toils and snares … "). The last three, which are now almost unknown, expressed the confidence of Newton's warmly evangelical Calvinism in the enduring goodness of God:

The Lord has promised good to me,
His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

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.

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

The New Year's service at which the hymn was sung for the first time also happened to be the last service that William Cowper ever attended at Olney; days afterward Cowper lapsed into the deep melancholy from which he never fully recovered. Along with several hundred hymns by Newton and several dozen by Cowper, "Amazing Grace" was first printed in their Olney Hymns of 1779.

From there the hymn meandered into common usage. What would turn out to be a key breakthrough was its publication by William Walker in his immensely popular hymnbook of 1835, The Southern Harmony. By pairing "Amazing Grace" with the tune "New Britain," Walker made it a fixture of Southern religious life. The authorship of "New Britain" is unknown (it may have originated in Scotland), but as much repetition has demonstrated, the fit between text and tune was ideal. A wider currency was guaranteed when the hymn was reprinted in 1844 in The Sacred Harp, which spurred the popularity of shape-note singing. Renditions from these Southern traditions soon brought the hymn into African American gospel music. When in the 1920s the first electronic recordings were made, they reflected this trajectory.

By that time, however, there had occurred another breakthrough. This one made the hymn much more accessible to Northern, mostly white, middle-CLASS audiences. Ira Sankey had already published an abridged version with a slightly neatened-up tune in his very popular Gospel Hymns. Then in 1910, Edwin Othello Excell, an active and profit-making hymn publisher, simplified the tune a little more, cut out Newton's last three stanzas, and added as a fourth stanza a verse that had been floating free in earlier American hymnbooks. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who put it to use in Uncle Tom's Cabin, was only one of many who had used "When we've been there ten thousand years … "

for her own hymnic purposes. But now in Excell's four-verse form, "Amazing Grace" began its meteoric 20th-century career.

Judy Collins' rendition in Whales and Nightingales from 1970 has been one of the most memorable recordings of the Excell revision, and it's fitting that she contributes a foreword to Turner's book. As an indication of how dramatically this Yankee version could differ from Southern, especially African American, renditions, Turner offers a striking contrast. Collins' four stanzas (plus a repeated first verse) took four minutes and four seconds. When in 1972 Aretha Franklin recorded the hymn at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in the Watts district of Los Angeles, she sang it in African American "long-meter" style rooted in Southern gospel: her recording of only two stanzas lasted 14 minutes.

Turner, who has earlier published books on Marvin Gaye, the Beatles, and Jack Kerouac, supplies a wealth of colorful details about the plethora of popular renditions that have occurred in recent decades. Especially after four best-selling recordings in the early 1970s by Collins, Franklin, the Great Awakening (British), and on bagpipes by the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, "Amazing Grace" was sung or recorded by almost everyone: Elvis, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie (at Woodstock), Tiny Tim, Rod Stewart, Madonna, and many other luminaries from blues, pop, rock, and jazz. As a result of this extraordinary recent popularity, the hymn has come to function as a source of consoling humanistic uplift at times of national tragedy, for the funerals of ordinary people and celebrities (including Richard Nixon, Joe DiMaggio, and John Kennedy, Jr.), and in movies (including Alice's Restaurant and Star Trek II). With American popularity must of course come also commercial rip-offs like Amazing Grace's Bar BQ in Kansas City and Amazing Grace Llamas in Perrysville, Ohio.

Steve Turner's expertise in pop culture is fully on display as he documents the incredible modern diffusion of this one hymn. Yet it is the great merit of Turner's fine book that the message intended by John Newton is never far from view. In turn, that message is the deepest reason for the great staying power of the hymn and also the great continuing power of the other memorable hymns from the 18th century. "Doc" Watson, one of the singers responsible for the hymn's popularity in modern folk music, expressed that message in the early 1960s with some of the directness that was so characteristic of Newton himself: "When Jesus went to the cross it took more than what old-timers called 'biting the bullet.' It was him showing that he loved us all enough that by the grace of God he would pay the sin debt for us on the cross and his grace showed me the way to go. The amazing grace of God is what the song is about."

Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford Univ. Press).

1. For a superb rendering of that career, see Bruce Hindmarsh, John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition (Oxford Univ. Press, 1996; reprint Eerdmans, 2000).