History of the Song Amazing Grace

The song Amazing Grace was written in the 1700s, but it gained new meaning  for me and many others when President Barack Obama sang it again at the funeral of the girls were brutally killed in Selma, Alabama. And then again, when Joan Baez sang a tribute to that president would sing an old country hymn at a very public gathering.

Precious Memories, How They Linger – An Older Joan Baez Remembered When the President Sang Amazing Grace

In 1725, Newton was born in Wapping, a district in London near the Thames. His father was a shipping merchant who was brought up as a Catholic but had Protestant sympathies, and his mother was a devout Independent, unaffiliated with the Anglican Church. She had intended Newton to become a clergyman, but she died of tuberculosis when he was six years old.^[5] For the next few years, while his father was at sea Newton was raised by his emotionally distant stepmother. He was also sent to boarding school, where he was mistreated.^[6] At the age of eleven, he joined his father on a ship as an apprentice; his seagoing career would be marked by headstrong disobedience.