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Rock journalist and poet Steve Turner has made a long career of writing about the history of pop music. Book-length treatments have focused on Marvin Gaye, the Beatles, Cliff Richard, U2, and Van Morrison. Most recently he turned his attention to the history of "Amazing Grace."

As a rock journalist, what musician has been your favorite subject?

I enjoyed writing about the Beatles because I'd grown up with them. It was great to be able indulge myself and listen to all the songs. My book A Hard Day's Write told the story behind every Beatles song, and there were a lot of anecdotes about how they came to be written.

How did writing that book inform what you did in Amazing Grace?

I've been particularly interested in backgrounds of things. I've gone to places where particular songs or books were written, like going on the fairy tale route in Germany and looking for where the Grimm's fairy tales were collected, or going to Switzerland and finding where Heidi was written, and also going to David Bowie's Berlin and Dylan's Woodstock. And then I wrote Hungry for Heaven, which was about rock music and religion.

How does your book on "Amazing Grace" relate to Hungry for Heaven?

Well it helped when talking about the background to Judy Collins's recording of "Amazing Grace." The fact that religion was considered okay for rock music around that time—late '60s, early '70s—meant "Amazing Grace" seemed a natural song to record at the time. But it wouldn't have done five or six years before that.

My background in music also meant I'd start out at an advantage because I knew who the artists were and, if they were still living, I knew who to contact in order to talk to them.

You've got a wonderful discography at the back of the book. What is your favorite recording of "Amazing Grace"?

I actually like the Rod Stewart version, a bluesy version with a slide guitar. There aren't very many blues-tinged versions of "Amazing Grace." I also think Aretha Franklin's version is outstanding. It's a very long version in the tradition of Mahalia Jackson where every syllable is invested with a tremendous amount of emotion.

I enjoyed the way you unpacked the difference between Judy Collins's secularized folk approach and Aretha Franklin's gospel approach.

Well, Judy's version is very clean, very white, if you like. It doesn't have any musical instruments in the background and is not impassioned enough. But Aretha's version is full of tremendous passion and lots of ad libs. They're from two different schools.

What is the strangest interpretation of the meaning of "Amazing Grace" you came across?

If people don't realize that the phrase how sweet thesound is in brackets, it can sound as if it's saying, "How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me"—that it's the sound that saved the wretch. Someone on the Internet had a theory of how there is a sound out there that will save people, would transform the world and bring peace. And this guy was dedicated to finding this sound. That was probably the most bizarre interpretation I've heard.

I once heard Arlo Guthrie at Chicago's Ravinia Festival say that "Amazing Grace" was about second chances and trying harder. How do artists like him turn a song about grace into a self-help ballad?

Well, I've heard Arlo say things like that. He gives an example of the sort of determination you need to give up smoking. I think that is one interpretation of grace that's popular today. It has to do with determination and overcoming obstacles. The Judy Collins version came around the time the New Ages therapies and encounter groups were coming into fashion. Post-1970, after the Judy Collins version, this belief that "Amazing Grace" is about doing it for yourself became quite popular. In fact, John Newton meant the exact opposite, that he'd reached the end of his tether, that he tried every means of reforming his own life. And it was only when he exhausted that absolutely that he realized God's grace. It's a complete opposite meaning to the one that people like Arlo Guthrie are putting out.

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March (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47