Amazing Grace

The words and the tune arrived from different directions and met late. John Newton wrote the verses for his congregation at Olney and published them in the Olney Hymns in 1779, without a melody attached, in Common Meter, the 8.6.8.6 line pattern that lets any hymn text ride any tune of the same shape. The melody is called NEW BRITAIN, and it first turns up in American shape-note collections around 1829 to 1831, with the Virginia Harmony usually named as the printing. The two were first married in William Walker's Southern Harmony in 1835, and The Sacred Harp reprinted the pairing in 1844. Everything here is long out of copyright, and the harmonization most of the world sings is Edwin Excell's, from 1900.

The tune is pentatonic: five notes, no fourth degree and no seventh. That is why it lies so easily under a pick, and why a fiddle, a banjo, a set of pipes or a mandolin can all play it without adjusting anything. It is also why it survived among people who had never seen a page of music. There is nothing in it that is hard to remember.

One phrase comes in two versions. On "I once was lost", church singers drop to the low G and walk back up through E to G. Session and pipe players repeat the opening phrase from the high d instead. Both are old and both are common. This page prints the sung reading, since that is what a listener expects, but know the high one too, so the fiddler beside you does not catch you off guard.

On a mandolin it sits in G in first position, with the pickup on the open D course. The melody stays on the D and A courses the whole way, apart from the B and d above them. For a lot of players it is the first tune they learn in three, and the long notes make it the natural place to start on tremolo. Hold the d in bar seven and the G at the end with an even shimmer instead of picking them once and waiting.