Revisiting Amazing Grace inspires new songs

Today’s musicians capture both the barbaric and the beautiful.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

three folk musicians face the camera across a meadow

Angeline, Cohen & Jon.

John Newton’s Amazing Grace was originally written to accompany his sermon for New Year’s Day 1773 and has become the most recorded and most sung hymn in the world. Last year was the 250th anniversary of the hymn’s creation while next year is the 300th anniversary of Newton’s birth.

The former slave trader who became a Church of England minister and abolitionist, preached his sermon on the theme of God’s mercy as outlined in a biblical passage from the first book of Chronicles. There, King David prays ‘Who am I Lord and what is my family that you have brought me thus far?’ Newton found parallels with his own life, having been saved from sinfulness and a storm at sea.

Among the many events and projects marking the two anniversaries, a folk album entitled Grace Will Lead Me Home may well be one of the most interesting. That is because, while it celebrates the hymn and its legacy, this album also explores “the distance between the world’s most beloved hymn and a most vile and shameful period in history, the trans-Atlantic slave trade”.

As captain of a slave ship when he became a Christian, Newton continued shipping Africans across the Atlantic. Later, he became Curate in Charge at St Peter and St Paul’s Church in Olney, where he befriended William Cowper and wrote the words to many hymns, including ‘Amazing Grace’. Later still, he lent his voice to the abolitionist cause. Despite these tensions in Newton’s life-story, the love that people have for ‘Amazing Grace’, including those who are descended from the slaves that Newton shipped across the Atlantic, became very apparent in a series of interviews conducted as part of the project before the songs forming the album were written and selected.

‘I’m going to hear John Newton preach’ is a key track on the album in which Jon Bickley describes Newton’s transformation from “foul-mouthed drunken sailor” to the captain able to “talk about how Grace can set you free”. In between, however, Bickley notes that the slaves disembark “leaving a trail of blood across the quay” while “the Captain’s in his cabin” writing about grace. Bickley’s songs on the album culminate in a powerful plea for reparations for slavery entitled ‘Sorry’. He writes:

“300 years after the birth of John Newton the road to redemption for those nations who profited from the slave trade looks long and difficult but surely it starts by saying Sorry.”

Bickley collaborated on the album with two musicians who have also played on other recent folk albums exploring the transatlantic slave trade and its legacy. Both Angeline Morrison and Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne played on a project by Reg Meuross entitled Stolen From God, while Morrison had also released The Sorrow Songs, which featured Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, to considerable acclaim. Both artists brought the weight of their study as well as their considerable artistic talents to the Grace Will Lead Me Home project.

Braithwaite-Kilcoyne brought the profound and arresting ‘Press Gang Song’ to the album. This is a resume of what it takes to become a slave trader from a readiness to “sail the fierce sea” to the willingness to “abuse your fellow man lead him shackled in chains”, “brutalise and violate, disregard their cries of pain”, “cast them overboard to a watery grace”, “for when that you do you shall master your trade”. This was the journey taken by Newton in becoming a slave trader.

Morrison, whose ‘Grace will lead me home’ is based on the Christian hope of resurrection, also writes from that perspective in ‘The Hand of Fanny Johnson’ from The Sorrow Songs. There, having noted the universality of death which “comes for the rich and the lowly”, she sings:

“My dear mother said that a funeral is holy,
The sanctified earth receiving the body,
And in the hereafter that’s when we will all be
Remade, entire and whole.”

Stolen from God, while clearly noting and condemning the way in which European Christians viewed the degradation inflicted on others as their God-given route to wealth, also makes some words of Frederick Douglass, a former slave turned abolitionist, writer and orator, central to the song cycle:

“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference… so wide that to receive the one as good, pure and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked… I love the pure, peaceable and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

The song ‘Stolen from God’ makes this contrast its central theme:

“God made these hands to hold and caress
He made these hands to worship and bless
He made these hands to hold my own child
God made these hands to be mild”

Yet, those involved in the slave trade:

“You made these hands to blister and bleed
To slave for the white man and bend to his greed
To cut coffee for gentlemen cane for their wives
At the cost of my family’s lives”

As a result, your legacy is “written in blood, everything stolen from God”.

This contradiction in the Christianity that underpinned the transatlantic slave trade is central to the story of Amazing Grace and its legacy (see Bickley’s ‘The choir still sings Amazing Grace’). Newton did come to see the error of his ways and lend his voice to the abolitionist cause in support of those like William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and Olaudah Equiano. Meuross effectively captures the beginning of this change in a song called ‘Bridgewater’ about an early petition against slavery:

“Reverend Chubb Mr Tucket Mr White
Call on every Christian soul to join the fight
To stand up as a nation ‘gainst this wicked violation
Though it might be bad for trade you know it’s right…
O brother oh brother oh brother
First the tide must turn before the flood”

The Sorrow Songs, Stolen From God and Grace Will Lead Me Home are three deeply moving and challenging albums, with Morrison and Braithwaite-Kilcoyne as the exceptional musicians linking all three, that tackle the history of the transatlantic slave trade, unearthing both incredible tales and uncomfortable truths. The Church is among the institutions that need most to hear and receive the truths and tales these albums share.

Angeline Morrison – The Sorrow Songs (Topic Records 2022)

Reg Meuross – Stolen From God (Hatsongs Records 2023)

Angeline, Cohen & Jon – Grace Will Lead Me Home (Invisible Folk 2024)

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11 November 2024

2 min read

Would you rather live in Wolf Hall?

Monarchy and deciding who's really in charge.

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

A TV production set shows Henry VIII at a masked ball.

Daniel Day-Lewis digs his claws into the role of Henry VIII.

BBC.

Viewers of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light may well have breathed a sigh of relief: thank goodness we don’t live in such times. Henry VIII, depicted by Damian Lewis with lionesque intensity, flexes and pouts at his Privy Council, prepared to send even his own daughter to the axeman’s block. He is unimaginably powerful, capricious, and easily offended.

Meanwhile, almost four-thousand miles away, we have just witnessed a democratic election in a nation which wanted nothing to do with kings. Donald Trump has won a second term in the White House - whatever one thinks of him, a sitting President is contained by counterpoised checks and balances. Congress. The Supreme Court. Here, at least, are some features that would have usefully reigned in Henry VIII’s absolute power.

Kings are perhaps cutting a rather pathetic figure right now, even without a sulky, fur-clad Damian Lewis to damage their PR. A few weeks ago, King Charles was heckled by an Australian Senator during a trip to Parliament: “not my King!” yelled Lidia Thorpe. Lately, King Felipe VI of Spain had dirt hurled at him as he walked through Paiporta, to examine the damages of recent floods. So much for a royal welcome.

So, is this just the way things are going? Farewell to tyrants. Humiliated, shouted at, mud-splattered and powerless - will we finally decommission them like old submarines?

But the question of “who’s really in charge here?” is one that all human societies have to face squarely. For our ancestors, there had to be something real behind a legitimate government. It could not just be a useful or appropriate way of organising ourselves - there had to be something copper-bottomed to give authority its clout. Only the gods could prop up a leader. In the pagan world, a philosopher like Aristotle would add that it is just the case that some people rule, some are ruled.

The UK constitution - though few would speak of it in this way - is premised on the idea that the King represents the people of this country to God, who alone can vouchsafe his legitimacy. A monarch in this sense is not absolute. They are contained - contained by the most comprehensive and eternal power that can be conceived. No tyrant gets away with it, on the Christian view.

All societies seek this real basis to power, whether that is “self-evident truths”, or the “will of the people”. The question is: which of them provide for a flourishing community for the longest? King Felipe may have been abused, but he did not flee to the refuge of a car like the Prime Minister. Here was a man of immense privilege reaching out to his subjects. Despite their pain and anger, he wanted to show he really cared - indeed, that he was born to care. For as long as monarchies seem like a reasonable and compassionate answer to the issue of legitimate government, they may endure yet.