Amazing Grace: The Story of America's Most Beloved Song

299 Pages·2003·1.15 MB·English

by  Steve Turner

(cid:1)
AmazingGrace
T H E S T O R Y O F
America’sMost Beloved Song
STEVE TURNER

Contents
Foreword by Judy Collins i v
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction x i i i
Prologue x i x
PA RT ONE: CREAT ION
1. Press-Ganged 3
2. Captive in Africa 21
3. Mid-Atlantic Crisis 33
4. Slave Captain 49
5. Olney Hymns 67
6. Abolition 91
PA RT TWO : DISSEMINAT ION
7. Meeting the Music 113
8. Spread by Revival 131
9. The Gospel Sound 147
10. In the Fo lk Tr adition 161
11. Into the Charts 177
12. Icon 195
13. Understanding Grace 211
APPENDICES
1. “Amazing Grace” Lists 2 2 7
2. Select Discography 2 3 1
3. Who’s Who 2 4 1
Select Bibliography 2 5 7
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Steve Turner
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
b y j u d y c o l l i n s
It seems to me that I have known “Amazing Grace” all my
life. I first learned the song from my maternal grandmother, Agnes
Byrd, when I was a young girl. From the beginning, I experienced
“Amazing Grace” as a powerful, evocative piece of writing, one that hit
the heart like a dose of sunshine, a wave of elation. When I sang
“Amazing Grace,” my heart soared. My soul seemed to heal, and all the
power and strength of those southern Methodists, with their fierce de-
termination to do good, surrender to God, carry the message of hope,
and try to make the world better, surrounded me, brought me comfort.
I hear a song in its stark and glorious simplicity that speaks, at least on
a metaphysical plane, of spiritual and physical unity.
My grandmother was born in Ohio in 1877. Her father had fought
for the Union and her family believed in the abolition of slavery. The
bloody Civil War was over by then and the country had begun the long
path to heal the wounds that slavery had inflicted on black Americans.
The fight to overcome the gruesome but previously accepted practice of
racial intolerance was only beginning.
When she was just a few years old, Grandma and her family of
eleven brothers and sisters moved to Tennessee. Many unhealed scars
still survived, and there were some who held to the idea that blacks,
freed by the Union victory, still shouldn’t live and work, love and sing
in the same rooms, the same cities, the same churches as their white
brethren. “Separate but equal” was thought by many to be the post-war
solution to the many freed slaves who were on the move to the north
and to the west to settle, often to scatter.
When she was in her teens, Grandma Byrd married into a family
where “brother had often fought against brother” in the Civil War and
she was exposed to a good share of prejudice about race. It is strange, I
think, that “Amazing Grace” would be one of her most important lega-
cies to me.
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My grandmother died in 1972. At that time I didn’t know that
“Amazing Grace” had a history that would have scalded some of my
grandmother’s prejudiced contemporaries’ views. Surely it would have
surprised them, as it did me, when I came upon the song’s history to
learn that the song had been created by John Newton, the captain of a
slave ship that probably brought some of my grandmother’s neighbors’
ancestors from Africa to the newly formed United States. Agnes could
not have known about the bleak chains of Newton’s near tomb, of his
shipwreck, and his survival. She did not know that the author of “Amaz-
ing Grace,” reformed in his views after writing his monumental song in
1772, would become a fierce, lifelong opponent of slavery, a fighter for
abolition, as well as a writer of hymns. She knew only, as I did, that
“Amazing Grace” had a power to transform and give faith—that wrongs
can be righted, that light can follow darkness, that healing is a miracle
of faith. This was the power instilled in her and her children.
In 1970, two years before Grandma Byrd’s death, I recorded
“Amazing Grace” on my eighth album, Whales and Nightingales. I am so
glad my grandma Byrd was able to hear it before she died.
During the sixties, I had been making records, singing folk music,
writing my own songs, and finding and recording the songs of other
singer-songwriters for ten years. My records had included songs of
love, of protest, of personal insight. I had become an interpreter of
songs by Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Leonard Cohen, and
Randy Newman, selling millions of records of my music, as well as the
music of others. I had marched against the war in Vietnam and
protested against the United States’ involvement in the continued
fighting in Indochina, in which so many American and Vietnamese
were dying for what I felt was an illegal and immoral war. I had prayed
and marched for peace and wondered if peace would ever come. The
year I recorded “Amazing Grace,” American troops were still in Viet-
nam and would be for another four years.
By the end of the sixties, I had lost hope in much of what the sixties
had promised, my life was chaotic and full of pain, complicated with a
divorce and the loss of custody of my son. When he returned to me at
the end of 1969, a difficult adjustment for both of us followed. I
searched for meaning—in therapy and in my career. I was looking for a
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renewal of my faith, which had faltered and flickered in that danger-
ous, violent time. It was into that climate of fear and confusion that my
recording of “Amazing Grace” arrived, with a power that reflected the
need for the spirituality that is in this song. This powerful hymn, and
the other songs I chose for the album, gave me the courage to believe
there were solutions that I might not know but could find, for my son
and for myself, if I let my faith and my music guide me.
One night after a particularly argumentative meeting of an en-
counter group I was part of, I was asked to sing a song that might
bring us all back together, a song we could all sing and relate to. I chose
“Amazing Grace.” Instantly, all disquiet faded from the group. We
stood together, singing. Everyone seemed to know at least part of the
song. We were transformed to a place that was calm and serene, peace-
ful and loving.
My producer, Mark Abramson, with whom I was working on my
current album, was at the meeting that night and called me in the
morning to tell me “Amazing Grace” was a song that should be in-
cluded on the album. I quickly agreed.
I recorded the song at St. Paul’s chapel on the campus of Columbia
University in New York. The chorus singing “Amazing Grace” was
comprised of many close personal friends, including Stacy Keach,
Harris Yulin, Yafa Lerner, Janet Young, and even one of my brothers,
Denver John. The recording was truly a coming together of family and
friends, kith and kin, and was performed in the same way my grand-
mother’s singing taught me, all those years ago. And it was my grand-
mother’s song that stood out, and shone among all the other songs like
the jewel it was and will always be.
The sound of “Amazing Grace” swept across the country, becoming
an instant hit, and for that reason, creating room for other spiritual
songs in the pop repertory. The voices of many other singers began to
transport a less orthodox audience to the spiritual places many of us
have abandoned in our departure from churches and synagogues, tem-
ples and the formal architecture of spirituality. I could be on a highway
somewhere and hear the sound of “Amazing Grace” or one of the other
popular hymns and feel the lift of hope, the soaring of my own wings of
desire and elation.
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It was only after “Amazing Grace” became a part of my life, my con-
certs, and my consciousness that I learned the story of how it was writ-
ten and of John Newton—his mighty yearning, his early spiritual
training, and his climactic, life-altering near tragedy. In fact, I, too,
wrote a book about the song, in which I told some of the story of New-
ton’s life and struggle and his great gift to all of us. I spoke primarily of
the spiritual impact the song had on my life.
Now I have the great pleasure to read this new, wonderful, enlight-
ening book. It bristles with great historical information—details of
John Newton and his family, his background, and the great service he
performed through his own enlightenment. In light of my intense re-
lationship with “Amazing Grace” and my awe at its power to heal, it is
with gratitude and astonishment that I read Steve Turner’s deep and
extensive history of Newton’s life, in which so many more layers are
revealed. This song was born out of the soul of a complicated and
unique man, and Turner has given us much more of the background for
the miracle of lyric and melody that is “Amazing Grace.” One of the
things I discovered in Mr. Turner’s book was the gradual falling away
of the presence of this great song in literature and oral tradition until
my recording of it in 1970. I am honored to have played a part in mak-
ing so many people aware once more of something rare and fine, a
song that performs magic in people’s souls. But my grandmother de-
serves all the credit, for she carried the song through time and gave it
to me to bring to others.
In the months since the tragedy of 9/11, the song has even more
poignancy and beauty. In the many years I have been singing “Amaz-
ing Grace,” I have found it difficult to imagine that more meaning and
hope could be communicated in its simple, direct, and heart-healing
message. Yet in the aftermath of the tragedy, in the streets of New York
as in cities all over the world that need healing, I sometimes hear
“Amazing Grace” wafting from the doors of a church or funeral home,
played by bagpipers. The melody itself is haunting and healing, even
without the transforming words. The book you are about to read is
thrilling and enlightening. Steve Turner has given us a gift—the story
of the foundation from which this flower of music and healing has
sprung.
Acknowledgments
I begin by honor ing those who trailblazed the intensive
study of single songs. There may well be more who have done so, but
those that came to my attention and inspired my interest are the late
Nigel Finch, who made a groundbreaking BBC television documentary
on “My Way” for the Arena series; Bill Nicholson, who gave similar
televisual treatment to the hymn “Abide with Me”; and rock critic Dave
Marsh, who produced a 246-page book on “Louie Louie” (published in
1993). After I had started the project I became aware of Clinton
Heylin’s Dylan’s Daemon Lover, an investigation into the seventeenth-
century ballad “The House Carpenter,” and David Margolick’s Strange
Fruit (published in 2000), which tackled the song made famous by Bil-
lie Holiday.
I began reading about John Newton after a casual remark made by
Bono (see prologue), but the first stage of development came when I
met Bobette Buster in Los Angeles and attended some of her screen-
writing classes at the George Lucas School of Cinema at the University
of Southern California. She encouraged me in my conviction that John
Newton’s life contained all the elements of great drama. Then, just as I
was considering writing a John Newton biography to facilitate research
for a screenplay, a book editor, Maurice Lyon, persuaded me to think
in terms of telling the story of “Amazing Grace” rather than of John
Newton on the grounds that the song was better known than its author.
I then have to thank my editor, Dan Halpern of Ecco, who re-
sponded so immediately and positively when I first mentioned the
idea of a book on “Amazing Grace” to him. Generally I dislike dis-
cussing book outlines on the phone because of the danger of misrep-
resenting my own ideas, but on this occasion I dared to explain and
Dan was sufficiently interested to ask me to e-mail a synopsis as soon
as I possibly could. After reading it he was keen enough to make an of-