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You tell about talking to Bono about "Amazing Grace." Did you talk to other artists about the song ?

Well if the artists were around, I'd talk to them. I talked to Pete Seeger, I talked to Joan Baez, I talked to Doc Watson, I talked to guys from the Dixie Hummingbirds and the Blind Boys of Alabama. If they were alive, I'd try to get hold of them. Aretha, for whatever reason, is not very available, even to do concerts. I would have liked to have talked to her.

As you talked to these artists, did you discuss the contrast between the way they perceived the song and what the song meant originally?

Yes, when I talked to Judy Collins. And Joan Baez surprised me by saying that she didn't think of it as a religious song. She thought of it like "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," a song that had origins in the church but had long since left that behind and could almost be regarded as a secular song. She seemed almost surprised that I would think of it as a religious song. The '60s, which was the time when a lot of people were abandoning the church, was the time that "Amazing Grace" really started to become a popular song outside of the church. It seemed strange to me that in the midst of the counterculture, you had people standing up singing this song by a Calvinist minister from England.

I was also surprised that Doc Watson, who is a blind, white folk/blues singer, sang "Amazing Grace" not because he was trying to dig up new traditional material as a lot of the urban folkies of the '60s were, but because it was something he really believed. He is a Christian, and he talked very passionately about how he believes every word of the song.

Beside the stylistic differences, what's the difference between gospel artists and folk or pop artists who have approached this song?

At the time that Tin Pan Alley was churning out formulaic pop songs, folk artists wanted to get back to something that was more real. This search for authentic American songs is illustrated by the Lomaxes, father and son, going around America with a tape recorder and recording folk songs from unlikely people. The suburban folkies of the '50s and '60s looked to the Lomax catalog to find genuine, non-Tin Pan Alley songs. So I think a lot of the motivation for folkies was that this was real music that meant a lot to mountain people and sharecroppers.

Black church people invest the song with a lot of personal meaning, and they'll talk about how grace has worked in their lives. In addition, the struggles that black people have come through related very much to the words of the song, that they have felt wretched, they've felt that they've been rescued, both individually and as a people.

And quite a lot of them are aware that it had a connection to slavery. They knew that Newton was involved in slave trade and that he'd also effectively been a slave when he was on Plantain Island in Sierra Leone. He'd been enslaved and he had enslaved people.

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March (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47