Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace is autobiography compressed into hymnody. John Newton went to sea as a boy, was pressed into the navy, flogged for desertion, and ended up in the Atlantic slave trade, eventually captaining slave ships. In March 1748, aboard a foundering vessel in a storm, he cried out for mercy, and marked the date ever after as the beginning of his conversion, though he continued in the trade for several more years, a fact he later confronted publicly.

Ordained in the Church of England after long refusal, he became curate of Olney, a lace making village where he wrote hymns for his weeknight prayer meetings in partnership with the poet William Cowper. Amazing Grace was written for the New Year sermon at the start of 1773, on a text from Chronicles in which David marvels at what God has done for him, and it was published in their joint collection, Olney Hymns, in 1779 under the heading Faith's Review and Expectation. Its six stanzas run Newton's story in miniature, lost and found, blind and seeing, through many dangers, toils and snares. In old age Newton supported Wilberforce, published a blunt pamphlet confessing the horrors of the trade he had served, and lived to see abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, the year he died. The epitaph he wrote for himself begins, John Newton, clerk, once an infidel and libertine.

In England the hymn was one Olney text among hundreds. America made it an anthem. Early American tunebooks tried it to various melodies until William Walker's Southern Harmony of 1835 fixed the words to New Britain, a pentatonic tune of folk origin, and that pairing, sung in the shape note conventions of the South, is the Amazing Grace the world knows. The stanza most congregations now sing last, when we've been there ten thousand years, is not Newton's at all, an anonymous wandering verse that Harriet Beecher Stowe attached to the hymn in Uncle Tom's Cabin, from where it entered the hymnals.

The hymn sank deep roots in the Black church, whose long metre singing traditions made it their own, and it travelled with the civil rights movement, sung in mass meetings and on marches. Judy Collins's unaccompanied recording of 1970 carried it onto the pop charts on both sides of the Atlantic, the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards' pipe band version followed, and it has become the default music of public mourning in the English speaking world, played at firefighters' and police funerals and sung by a president in Charleston in 2015. Its journey is complete in one respect above all, a hymn by a former slave trader became a treasured song of the descendants of the enslaved, grace working on the text's own terms.