Amazing Grace
Amazing grace
How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
—Traditional, “Amazing Grace”
“AMAZING Grace” was born in a period of political strife in England and the United States, and perhaps my latter-day version served as a kind of tonic during another time of social upheaval.
In late January 1970, I became involved in an encounter group with a number of friends in New York. It began when I met Candy Jackson at a dinner party. Candy was a tall, handsome, and articulate recovering addict who had fled from Synanon, the West Coast sober community for drug users. Candy had been hired to run the encounter groups at Phoenix House, an in-house treatment center for drug addicts and alcoholics on the Upper West Side in New York.
In the course of the evening’s conversation he learned that some friends and I were planning to meet and discuss buying property in Vermont. Like New Englanders from an earlier century, we would find a way to live together, sharing property, money, and the fruits of the land.
Candy said, “Before you do that, you have to encounter each other, see what you are all made of.”
Candy came to our first meeting, and after we let him give his spiel, none of us ever talked again about buying land. We “encountered” one another, with Candy leading us, for the next two years. He had found a gold mine: neurotic Upper West Siders who needed to tear one another to pieces and would pay him to help us do it. Insane, now that I think of it. Perhaps we should have known better, but in fact, there were some surprising things that came out of those sessions.
For one thing, Candy nailed me on my alcoholism and dared me to stop drinking. I took the dare and stayed away from alcohol for two months. I started again, of course, but Candy had pierced through my wall of denial … for the moment. And while it was all right for me to call myself an alcoholic, and for me to tell my therapists that I was an alcoholic, God forbid anyone else should point it out!
Mark Abramson and Jac Holzman were part of the group, and Mark proved himself to be so effective in drawing out other people’s concerns that Jac asked him to lead a group of Elektra executives at a weekend retreat. That was Mark’s first involvement with any kind of group therapy; later, after he moved to upstate New York, he helped run therapy groups for inmates at a nearby prison. It was said of him that he was an excellent therapist. I was not surprised.
One night, members of the group were at one another’s throats. Mark said to me, “You should sing something. We are losing it here; everybody has to calm down.” I sang “Amazing Grace,” thinking that at least it was a song some of us knew. The next morning Mark called me.
“We have to record that song,” he said.
And so we did.
Mark and I decided that this next album—my ninth for Elektra—had to have a flavor that was spiritual in its nature. We would not have used that term, but we were searching. “Farewell to Tarwathie,” with the singing whales, was the first step in the right direction, and with “Amazing Grace,” I knew we had found the defining song, the spiritual center, of the album, which we called Whales and Nightingales.
We recorded several other traditional songs, among them “Simple Gifts,” a Shaker song that Aaron Copland adapted for Appalachian Spring, and “Gene’s Song.” I was taught this little gem by Evelyn Beers and her husband, Bob, who started the Fox Hollow Folk Festival in Petersburgh, New York, in 1966. The Beers were fascinated by folk crafts, such as the little walking man on a string that you gently bounce on a thin board of balsa wood, which makes him “dance.” Evelyn supplied the rhythm for this charming folksong with those little dancing feet.
Other songs on the album came from contemporary composers and songwriters, including Jacques Brel, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. “Nightingales I” and “Nightingales II” were my compositions, and Josh Rifkin orchestrated them both beautifully.
All of the songs on this collection emerged, I believe, out of my personal ideas about faith. They explore the power of nature in our lives, the idea that all life is sacred, and the idea that the planet, in its beauty and fragility, is being hunted, like the great whales, to depletion. That spring marked the first celebration of Earth Day, a signal event in raising environmental consciousness.
The album culminates with “Amazing Grace.” I learned the song from my maternal grandmother, Agnes Byrd. I had known it for most of my life, but I was not familiar with the story of John Newton, the English slave-trading captain who wrote the song. He had nearly died in a shipwreck. He became a minister and, years later, wrote “Amazing Grace.”
We recorded “Amazing Grace” in St. Paul’s Chapel on the campus of Columbia University. I brought in a group of friends to sing in the choir, some professional, but mostly amateurs: Eric Weissberg, Harris Yulin, Stacy Keach, and my brother Denver John. I loved the haunting echoes bouncing around the chapel, lending an otherworldly quality to the song.
But an a cappella hymn? People at the label were getting a kick out of this, knocking it around, playing it for one another, delighted, but with no thought of its becoming anything but a good filler on the album. They were as shocked as I was when it turned out the universe had other plans. This recording of “Amazing Grace” dominated the radio waves, the album flew out of the stores, and within weeks it became a worldwide sensation.
It seemed that people had not tired of prayer or of hymns or of church. They just needed the music.