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Amazing Grace
Words by John Newton, 1772; music: traditional American melody “New Britain,” first published 1829
Few songs carry a story quite like this one. John Newton, the man who wrote these words, spent his early life at sea, and for years he worked in the Atlantic slave trade. As a young sailor he was in some ways a captive himself. He was left stranded on the coast of West Africa, where he was mistreated and half-starved by the trader he worked for. After he was rescued, a violent storm in March 1748 nearly sank his ship. Newton later pointed to that night as the turning point of his life.
That turning, though, was slow. Newton went on to captain slave ships for several more years before leaving the sea because of ill health. Eventually he became a clergyman in the Church of England and settled in the small market town of Olney, in Buckinghamshire. There he wrote hymns for his congregation’s weekly meetings, often to go along with that week’s sermon. He wrote this one in late 1772 for a New Year’s Day service. It was published in 1779 in a collection called Olney Hymns, which he put together with his friend, the poet William Cowper. In that book it went by a much plainer title: “Faith’s Review and Expectation.”
In his later years Newton came to speak openly against the trade he had once served. In 1788 he published a pamphlet describing its cruelties, and he became an ally of William Wilberforce in the campaign to end it. Newton lived just long enough to see Britain outlaw the slave trade in 1807, and he died in December of that same year.
The melody we sing today came from a different place and time. In England the hymn was never widely popular. In America, however, it traveled through camp meetings and shape-note singing schools, and it met its tune there. The melody known as “New Britain,” whose composer is unknown, first appeared in an 1829 songbook. In 1835 a South Carolina singing master named William Walker paired it with Newton’s words in his popular collection Southern Harmony. The two have been together ever since. The well-loved final verse that many people sing today wasn’t written by Newton at all. It came from an older hymn and had become attached to “Amazing Grace” by the mid-1800s, when Harriet Beecher Stowe included it in Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852.
As a hymn it never needed the charts, yet it found its way onto them anyway. Judy Collins recorded it in 1970 in St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia University, choosing the chapel for its natural echo. Her version reached number 15 in the United States and number 5 in Britain, and it stayed on the British charts for 67 weeks. Two years later a bagpipe version by the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards went all the way to number 1 in Britain. Also in 1972, Aretha Franklin made it the title song of her live gospel album, which became the best-selling record of her career.
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