Amazing Grace

This church is 115 years old. It’s small. Impossibly small, only able to fit 25 people—30 people if they are scrawny. The church is nestled in Appalachia, and looks like a postcard.

The first thing you notice about the building is that it’s all wood. Spruce. Oak. Walnut. Which is unique in the modern world. We don’t use much wood anymore. Contractors would not use purely wood to build, for example, a Ruby Tuesday. They’d use aluminum and cement siding.

You also notice that this place is not a modern non-denom church whose name is a verb. This is not a Six Flags Over Jesus church with a hair band, strobe lights, and a Cinnabon in the lobby.

This place is earthen. Stone. Wood. Plaster. The acoustics are startlingly great. You can whisper in the back and someone at the pump organ can hear you. You would not want to have lower gastrointestinal distress during an altar call here.

The floorboards creak. The room smells like your grandmother’s basement. The pews are worn smoothe from a lifetime of abuse from evangelical butts. Through six-paned windows you can see the Great Smoky Mountains in all their autumnal glory.

I sit in a front pew and play “Amazing Grace” on my fiddle. I play it the way I remember hearing it fiddled as a child, played by old men. Slow. Droning, like bagpipes, only sadder.

I sing all the verses. Just like I did at my own father’s funeral. I remember being a kid, looking at all those mourners, and wondering “What if I screw up?”

There are six verses to “Amazing Grace.” But most people just sing three. The seventh verse, “When we’ve been there 10,000 years…” is an add-on from a later author. Not an original. But I think the fifth verse is my favorite.

“Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail,

“And mortal life shall cease,

“I shall possess, within the veil,

“A life of joy and peace.”

The tones from my fiddle resonate against these archaic walls. This is the song of my people. And it somehow fits this silent room.

Probably because this is a bygone song, meant for bygone places. And this is one such place. A church where dirt farmers lived and died. A place where the poor came for help.

Where the abused came for sanctuary. Where country preachers, uneducated and illiterate, held the frail hands of the dying. Where self-taught orators spoke of a great, vast, mysterious, and controversial Love that applied to all mankind. Even a Wretch Like Me.

My friend and boyhood idol Bobby Horton, a great American, told me that the melody for “Amazing Grace” was originally the tune “Loving Lambs,” an American folk melody in the early 1800s. The tune was later applied to a poem entitled “Amazing Grace,” then published in 1831 in The Virginia Harmony Songbook. The rest is history.

Since then, “Amazing Grace” has become the most popular folk hymn in the world. The most popular song in recorded history, translated into nearly 7,000 languages, sung for 252 years, and performed an estimated 10 million times annually.

And all this makes me wonder why? Why has humankind latched onto this song? What is it about these lyrics?

Why have our ancestors kept this song alive for centuries? Why do we sing it at funerals? Why do we teach it to our children? What are the ghosts of our ancestors trying to tell us?

I’m no expert. But perhaps the answer can be found in the title.