Amazing Grace is one of the most recognisable songs in the English-speaking world – who hasn’t been exposed countless times to these iconic opening lines?
Amazing grace, How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see
It was written in 1772 by English Anglican clergyman John Newton (1725-1807), drawn very much from personal experience. He had grown up without any particular religious bent and after a time having been pressganged into service with the Royal Navy, he became involved in the Atlantic slave trade. However, in 1748 he was on a vessel caught up in a storm so violent that he begged God for mercy and underwent (having presumably got his feet back on terra firma) something of a spiritual conversion. Thereafter, Newton gave up seafaring, studied Christian theology, and became a vocal abolitionist. He once was lost but now was found.
Newton was ordained into the Church of England in 1764, and took a post as curate at Olney in Buckinghamshire, where he met and began to write hymns with William Cowper (who himself would become a celebrated poet and hymnodist). They wrote Amazing Grace to illustrate a sermon Newton was giving on New Year’s Day 1773 with the message that forgiveness and redemption are possible regardless of sins committed and that the soul can be delivered from despair through the mercy of God. It debuted in print in 1779 in their collaborative Olney Hymns.
At this stage, Amazing Grace, like all the other Olney hymns, was still relatively obscure but it took off in the United States when it was picked up and extensively used by Baptist and Methodist preachers during the Protestant revival movement of the early 19th century (the so-called Second Great Awakening). In 1835, American composer William Walker set the words to the tune known as New Britain and this is the version you’ll hear today.
The song has unsurprisingly become a staple of Gospel music, and has also crossed over into secular music with a particular influence in folk music. It’s been recorded thousands of times in the twentieth century, from Elvis Presley to the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards; today though, I offer a version by American folk singer Judy Collins, recorded in 1993 with the Boys’ Choir of Harlem.
