I've talked a little bit about my musical past--how I grew up in a church with a youth choir that sang contemporary Christian music (contemporary to the 1970s) and how much I loved getting away from that when I left home and discovered traditional choir repertoire.
Well, yesterday in my usually very traditional current church choir, we performed a service of all gospel and gospel-inspired music. Running the gamut from revival tent hymns like "Bringing in the Sheaves" to "I Know Where I've Been" from Hairspray, the service shows how wide ranging American religious music can be. The title of the concert comes from the hymn "Amazing Grace" which forms the starting point for the musical tradition and for the concert.
I actually happen to know something about the hymn "Amazing Grace." I once gave a program on the history of the hymn and it's author, John Newton. Newton was a British captain of a ship in the slave trade. He transported Africans from the Ivory Coast to the Caribbean and then transported rum or sugar cane from the Caribbean to England. At one point he was enslaved himself after being shipwrecked. This led to a religious awakening and his work as a curate (sort of an assistant minister in a parish church), and his support of the British abolitionist movement in the late 18th century.
Newton wrote the words to "Amazing Grace" sometime in the 1770s and they were put to an existing tune. One tidbit that I remember: the verse that begins "When we've been here ten thousand years" was not written by Newton, but appears in Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Whether she wrote the words or had heard them somewhere else is not known.
Anyway, I enjoyed my one Sunday a year venture back into contemporary Christian gospel, although I'll be glad to rehearse Brahms or Mendelssohn at choir rehearsal this Wednesday.
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