Amazing Grace

The melody came later, and in America. As a common-metre text, the words could be sung to many tunes. The earliest known printed setting is in a London collection of 1808, to a tune called “Hephzibah,” and more than twenty others followed. In 1835 William Walker set the words to “New Britain” in his shape-note tunebook Southern Harmony. That tune had been pieced together from two melodies, “Gallaher” and “St. Mary,” first printed in Columbian Harmony (Cincinnati, 1829), and it is the one sung almost everywhere today. The verse that now usually ends the hymn, “When we’ve been there ten thousand years,” is not Newton’s. It comes from “Jerusalem, My Happy Home,” printed in A Collection of Sacred Ballads in 1790, and Harriet Beecher Stowe gave it to Uncle Tom to sing alongside Newton’s stanzas in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Between 1900 and 1910 the publisher Edwin O. Excell printed it with the hymn, and his version became the standard form in American churches. Ralph Stanley’s 1977 recording is one example: it uses Newton’s first two stanzas and ends with the borrowed verse.

Records followed quickly: the first known recording is an a cappella version by a Sacred Harp choir in 1922. In country and bluegrass it became a regular gospel number in the early 1960s. Carl Story and his Rambling Mountaineers opened Mighty Close to Heaven (Starday, 1963) with it, recorded in Nashville in November 1962. On 8 April 1963, at the King studio in Cincinnati, Don Reno, Red Smiley and the Tennessee Cutups sang it as a quartet with only Steve Chapman’s guitar behind them. It opened their LP The World’s 15 Greatest Hymns and in 1964 was released as a King single, backed with “Mansion in the Sky.” The same year Folkways issued Doc Watson singing it unaccompanied with Jean Ritchie and Roger Sprung, recorded at Gerde’s Folk City in New York.

The Stanley Brothers recorded it at least twice. On 14 December 1963 in Baltimore, they cut it as a quartet for radio, with Jack Cooke singing lead. That version came out in 1966 on Wango under the name John’s Gospel Quartet. On 8 December 1965 in Concord, Arkansas, they recorded it for Rimrock with Carter Stanley on lead, Ralph Stanley tenor, Ralph Mayo baritone and George Shuffler bass. After Carter’s death, Ralph recorded it again on 12 May 1977 at Lemco Sound Studio in Lexington, Kentucky, for Clinch Mountain Gospel (Rebel). This time it was sung in the call-and-response manner of the Primitive Baptist church he grew up in, with Keith Whitley and Jack Cooke singing and Chester “Pop” Marshall adding the bass voice.