The urban legend about the song "Amazing Grace" lives on.

Check out this paragraph from a blog post honoring Pete Seeger on his 90th birthday:

"Now, if you ever miss that feeling of being among the youngest in a crowd, I highly recommend attending your pal's ninetieth birthday party. It's the perfect way to get that warm enfant terrible feeling all over again. I had a wonderful time strumming and harmonizing with Pete and his posse. At one point when the folk song army was conducting a rather croonish version of "Amazing Grace," Pete got up from his chair, interrupted, and told the story of how the words were written: how the captain of a slave ship had a moment of clarity and turned the ship around back to Africa. He then led the assembled to raise their voices to sustain each word and note, converting it back from a mere folk song into a gospel spiritual again. The guy's still got it."

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield Happy Birthday, Pete Seeger
Posted by Al Giordano - May 3, 2009 at 8:31 am

(my italics for emphasis)

-snip-

Here's a paragraph that debunks that commonly held version:

Turner... explodes what he calls the "folk myth version" (p. 49) of the hymn's origins,
according to which Newton converted to Christianity and abandoned the slave trade after his near loss of life, and wrote "Amazing Grace" about his having done so. In fact, Turner argues, Newton began commanding slave-trading ships only after embracing Christianity, saw no inconsistency between these two commitments, and turned against slavery only
gradually."
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=9298


"Turner" is Steve Turner. Amazing Grace: The Story of America's Most Beloved Song. New York: Ecco, 2002. xxxii + 266 pp. $23.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-06-000218-3; $14.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-06-000219-0

-snip-

Here's an account of Newton's composition of "Amazing Grace" that provides information about the hymn's tune:

"Steve Turner's book Amazing Grace: The Story of America's Most Beloved Song tells the story of composer John Newton's conversion from slave trader to abolitionist, and traces the evolution of the song from its composition in 1772 as a hymn with no set tune to the version familiar today.

Amazing Grace" was first heard on New Year's Day in 1773. Turner tells NPR's Liane Hansen it was written without "ceremony" in an attic room where Newton wrote weekly hymns to amplify the message of his sermons. When Newton put the internal rhyme "amazing grace" together, it wasn't purely for poetic reasons. He understood grace to mean God's unmerited favor to lost souls. Turner says it was a meaning Newton — with his sordid history and personal tale of redemption — could take to heart.

Newton supplied the lyrics, but the tune sung today arrived much later. Turner says that in Newton's day, the song would have been sung "to another song that fit its meter" — if it were sung at all. And "Amazing Grace" continued to be associated with a number of different tunes throughout much of the 19th century. In 1835, "...the tune that we now sing... was married to the words of John Newton," Turner says. That same year a South Carolina singing instructor named William Walker published a widely popular hymn book combining the now-familiar tune with Newton's words."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=894060