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GRACE UNBOUNDED
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Amazing Grace! (Stanzas Added)
These are stanzas added by the Folk Process
They were not part of the original Amazing Grace,
which was published in 1779 in Olney Hymns
set to the unaccompanied tune used
by the
Old Regular Baptists of Kentucky (MIDI)
The more generally customary tune, NEW BRITAIN: (MIDI)
A Collection of Sacred Ballads, 1790* :
When we've been there† ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We've no less days to sing God's praise
Than when we'd first begun.† (or "here", whether out of habit or belief)*Note: This was its first known appearance; it did not become associated with Amazing Grace for decades.
Sources unknown:
Amazing grace has set me free
To touch, to taste, to feel
The wonders of accepting love
Have made me whole and real.
(A variation on the first Olney stanza:)
Amazing grace! how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I'm found,
Was bound, but now I'm free.
(A variation on the sixth Olney stanza:)
The world shall soon to ruin go
The sun refuse to shine
But God, who called me here below
Shall be forever mine.
Praise God, praise God, praise God, praise God,
Praise God, praise God, praise God,
Praise God, praise God, praise God, praise God,
Praise God, praise God, praise God.
- Note:
- "Praise God" can be used effectively as a choral or soprano descant accompanying the last stanza in a cento ending with either the "when we've been there 10,000 years" or the "was bound but now I'm free" stanza
How long, dear Saviour, oh how long
Have I on earth to stay?
Roll on, roll on, ye wheels of time
And bring that joyful day.Note:
How long, dear Saviour, Oh how longor "swifter round")I'll be working up rough MIDIs of both tunes soon. Burke points out that the CCEL's Watts collection shows a text almost identical to this as the last stanza of one of his hymns.
shall this bright hour delay?
Fly swift around*, ye wheels of time,
And bring the promised day.* (
From
How sweet the name of Jesus sounds
In a believer's ear
It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds
And drives away his fear.
From a hymn by Thomas Shepherd, 1693 (customary tune: MAITLAND [MIDI] ):
Must Jesus bear the cross alone
And all the world go free?
No, there's a cross for everyone
And there's a cross for me.
From the (Short Meter — 6.6.8.6) hymn The Day Is Past and Gone by John Leland, 1792:
_ _ We lay our garments by
Upon our beds to rest
'though death may soon disrobe us all
Of what we now possess.
According to Jean Ritchie, in the Old Regular Baptist (ORB) tradition the first two stanzas are:The day is past and gone,Here is a simple rendition of the ORB tune Jean recalls from "Mom's church": MIDI.
The evening shades appear;
O may we all remember well
The hour of death is near.
We lay our garments by,
Upon our beds to rest-
So time will soon disrobe us all
Of what we now possess.
From a hymn by Isaac Watts, 1721-24 (customary tune: ARLINGTON [MIDI] ):
Am I a Soldier of the Cross?
A follower of the Lamb,
And shall I fear to own His cause,
Or blush to speak His name?Must I be carried to the skies
On flowery beds of ease,
While others fought to win the prize,
And sailed through bloody seas?Of which stanza one JVZ posting at the Mudcat Café gave the following variant, ascribing it to Newton:
Shall I be wafting to the sky,
On flowery beds of ease.
While others strive to win the prize,
And sail on bloody seas.
From another hymn by Dr. Watts, 1707:
Alas, and did my Savior bleed
And did my Sovereign die?
Would he devote that sacred head
For such a worm as I?gives the 1885 gospel-hymn expansion by Ralph E. Hudson, At the Cross (Hudson wrote the tune HUDSON [MIDI] and added the refrain);
- Notes:
- 1) The Cyber Hymnal
2) When sung as originally written, i.e. without the refrain, the customary tune is MARTYRDOM, also known as AVON: MIDI; 3) Some hymnals (e.g. United Methodist Hymnal (1990), The Hymnal for Worship and Celebration (Word, 1986) and The Worshiping Church (Hope, 1990), give both HUDSON and MARTYRDOM versions, generally under different rubrics; 4) Modern hymnals usually change the fourth line to "For sinners such as I?", in keeping with the anti-worm bias of the times.
And
The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want
He makes me down to lie
In pastures green He leadeth me
The quiet waters by.
“AND,” as "LR Mole" wrote in the Mudcat Café, “a lot of Emily Dickinson ("Because I could not stop for death...") AND "Casey at the Bat" AND "Old Ironsides" ("Ay, tear her tattered ensign down...") AND "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner". ...” AND, as "Wyrd Sister" further noted, "While shepherds watched their flocks by night" ... All this goes to illustrate why the meter in question is called "Common Meter"!
Not to mention numerous parodies of the text sung to "New Britain", as well as versions setting some or all of the Olney text (with or without the Ten Thousand Years add-on) to the tunes of "House of the Rising Sun", "Wimoweh", the theme songs of Gilligan's Island and The Mickey Mouse Club... oy gevalt!
Despite its name, NEW BRITAIN appears to be a tune of American origin, first published and most widely attested in the fasola shapenote tradition of the second quarter of the 19th century, whence it migrated into mainstream hymnals in the twentieth century as the customary tune for "Amazing Grace". The Old Regular Baptist tune here presented is also presumably of 19th-century American origin. This raises the question of the tune or tunes to which the text was customarily sung in other times and places. If you know anything about the tune(s) used for "Amazing Grace" prior to 1830, or in non-shapenote America before 1900, or in the United Kingdom before New Britain reached Old Britain, please email me. Ditto if you have anything to add to this page, or any corrections to propose (please specify your sources or authorities). BTW, when I say such and so is the "customary" tune for a text, I mean only that based on the 30-odd hymnals at my immediate disposal, most of which are US Protestant collections of the last half of the 20th century, the tune in question is so applied more frequently than any other. There is no hymn of any vogue (not even "Amazing Grace", as this page amply demonstrates!) that has one and only one tune universally associated with it.
My chief source for most of these additional stanzas was a couple of threads on the subject at the Mudcat Café, an incredible resource for the discussion of virtually any issue, especially if it intersects the folk process in music! I owe particular thanks to Mudcat contributors Jean Ritchie (and her son Jon who sent me the ORB tune), Burke, and Barbara Shaw, but many other individuals and sites had some input. Thank you all.
Thread: Amazing Grace
Thread: Lyr Req: Amazing Grace 'disrobed' stanza
- Links with the Old Regular Baptist tune:
- Sheet Music of this tune (JPEG) as sung by Jean Ritchie
- The original Olney stanzas (I haven't checked the typographical accidentals)
- Two Esperanto hymns (parallel texts: on the left a pretty good hymn written originally in Esperanto;
on the right, a rather lame translation of Olney 1-5 plus the 10,000 years stanza) - Links with the usual New Britain tune:
- The Cyber Hymnal
(scroll down for links to Afrikaans, romanized Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Kiowa, Navajo, Spanish) - Two Esperanto hymns: Mirinda graco (translation); Miriga graco (original)
- Cherokee version (syllabic) (Cherokee Christian oral tradition recalls the singing of this hymn
on the Trail of Tears from the Carolinas to the Indian Territory; is the tune recalled?) - Two Japanese versions (one in kana, the other in romaji)
- Scottish Gaelic version (scroll down below collection of English stanzas)
- Offline resources:
- A Lakota version is in the United Church of Christ's 1995 New Century Hymnal (in a [to me] disconcertingly anglicizing orthography)
The ESPERANTO Online Hymnal
is affiliated with
Eldonejo Cigneto