Amazing Grace: John Newton, slavery and the world's most enduring song - Softcover

Turner, Steve

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745951783 ISBN 13: 9780745951782

Publisher: Lion Books, 2005

Synopsis

Top music writer Steve Turner traces the biography of 'Amazing Grace', the world's most recorded song. Versions of this hymn have been performed by artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Johnny Cash, Rod Stewart and Destiny's Child. The book begins with the dramatic story of John Newton and his participation in the African slave trade through to his writing of 'Amazing Grace' and his campaigning against slavery. The second part of the book - picking up the thread in the years following Newton's death - tells the story of the song itself as it has spread and developed over the past 280 years and its recordings by artists from a wide variety of musical backgrounds. This includes the aftermath of September 11th when the hymn became an international anthem of hope and solidarity.

About this title

About the Author

STEVE TURNER is a performance poet and journalist. Author of several anthologies of adult verse, children's poetry and many rock biographies.

From Publishers Weekly

This carefully crafted and finely probed book will stand as the definitive look at what is perhaps the most popular hymn in American history a song that Turner argues has "more than eleven hundred currently available albums featuring versions." Turner's previous books on music and musicians (Trouble Man: The Life and Death of Marvin Gaye; Hungry for Heaven: Rock and Roll and the Search for Redemption) have dealt with the religious themes behind the historical facts, and his newest is no exception. Turner begins by detailing the life of the song's author, John Newton, an 18th-century slave trader whose miraculous survival during an 11-hour storm at sea in 1748 sparked a religious conversion that led to his becoming a minister (and later an avowed abolitionist) and to writing the hymn in 1773. Turner's examination of Newton's life and how it influenced the words of "Amazing Grace" gives an added resonance to the second half of his book. From the song's early 20th-century popularity in gospel music to its adoption by folk singers in the 1950s, from Judy Collins's hit single in the early 1970s to openly secular interpretations by artists and writers such as Allen Ginsberg, the central historical paradox of Newton's specifically religious song, Turner observes, is that "although the song still holds its original meaning for millions of Christians around the world, it now has a parallel existence outside the church, where often the only link is a shared belief that it is a song about hope."
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Lion Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0745951783
• ISBN 13: 9780745951782
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304