Steve Turner - Amazing grace : the story of Americas most beloved song

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 determination 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 shouldnt 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 legacies to me.

My grandmother died in 1972. At that time I didnt know that Amazing Grace had a history that would have scalded some of my grandmothers prejudiced contemporaries views. Surely it would have surprised them, as it did me, when I came upon the songs history to learn that the song had been created by John Newton, the captain of a slave ship that probably brought some of my grandmothers neighbors ancestors from Africa to the newly formed United States. Agnes could not have known about the bleak chains of Newtons near tomb, of his shipwreck, and his survival. She did not know that the author of Amazing 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 faiththat 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 Byrds 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 Vietnam 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 meaningin therapy and in my career. I was looking for a renewal of my faith, which had faltered and flickered in that dangerous, 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 encounter 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, peaceful 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 included on the album. I quickly agreed.

I recorded the song at St. Pauls 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 grandmothers singing taught me, all those years ago. And it was my grandmothers 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, temples 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.

It was only after Amazing Grace became a part of my life, my concerts, and my consciousness that I learned the story of how it was written and of John Newtonhis 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 Newtons 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, enlightening book. It bristles with great historical informationdetails of John Newton and his family, his background, and the great service he performed through his own enlightenment. In light of my intense relationship with Amazing Grace and my awe at its power to heal, it is with gratitude and astonishment that I read Steve Turners deep and extensive history of Newtons 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. Turners 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 making so many people aware once more of something rare and fine, a song that performs magic in peoples souls. But my grandmother deserves all the credit, for she carried the song through time and gave it to me to bring to others.