Melodies for Amazing Grace

Subject: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: Animaterra
Date: 02 Oct 98 - 01:23 PM

OK, I couldn't resist, but out of respect to those on the other Amazing Grace thread I choose to do it this way. May 9-yr old likes to sing Amazing Grace to the tune of the old Micky Mouse club theme; it doesn't scan out quite at the end but she's worked it out.

Other tunes which work together: Hernando's Hideaway/Doxology (Praise God from whom all blessings flow...)

Others???

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: mmario
Date: 02 Oct 98 - 02:03 PM

Amazing Grace/doxology/House of the Rising Sun/Gilligan's Island theme song/hernando's hideaway all*interchangeable* or virtually so...

mmario

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: Jerry Friedman
Date: 02 Oct 98 - 06:26 PM

Poets call it ballad stanza and hymnodists (?) call it common meter.

Da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUm
Da-DUM da-DUM da-DUm
Da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUm
Da-DUM da-DUM da-DUm

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From:
Date: 11 Dec 04 - 01:29 AM

Does anyone know where I can get a recording of Amazing Grace done to the House of the Rising Sun melody???

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: masato sakurai
Date: 11 Dec 04 - 01:48 AM

It's on Blind Boys of Alabama's Spirit of the Century. You can hear the sound clip HERE.

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: GUEST,robinia
Date: 11 Dec 04 - 02:16 AM

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: GUEST,robinia
Date: 11 Dec 04 - 02:57 AM

Sorry about that empty posting! "The old melody," as sung by Horton Barker of Beech Creek, North Carolina, and recorded by Sandy Paton for Folkways Records FA 2362 is not only beautiful; it also extends the song with its chorus of :

I want to live a Christian here;
I want to die a shouting.
I want to feel my savior near
When soul and body's parting.

A hauntingly hypnotic version (and I seem to recall Jean Ritchie saying she was familiar with it). Also, after learning and singing it for years from the record, I see upon checking back that I have unwittingly made a small change: "I want to live a Christian life."

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: masato sakurai
Date: 11 Dec 04 - 08:44 PM

For other earlier tunes to "Amazing Grace," see Enos E. Dowling Hymnal Collection, where they're AZMON, NEW BEDFORD, CORINTH, NOYES, AMAZING GRACE (different tune), and MEAR.

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 12 Dec 04 - 09:27 AM

At the MBA session in (I think) 2000 I had the pleasure of hearing Debbie McClatchey play and sing, among other things, Amazing Grace. She used a different tune than the one that's usually heard, and it was very convincing and pleasing. I have no idea what the name of that tune was, but from context it seemed that it was a well established Amazing Grace tune.

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: GUEST
Date: 13 Dec 04 - 12:49 AM

Amazing Grace can also be sung to a wide array of songs that use a series of 8 4/4 measures , e.g.:
---America The Beautiful (Materna)
---Auld Lang Syne (To which tune, BTW, Katherine Bates's "ATB" poem was often sung for 2 years in the early 1890s)
---Puff, The Magic Dragon
---Let Me Call You Sweetheart
--- Beethoven's "Ode To Joy"

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: Burke
Date: 13 Dec 04 - 07:27 PM

Hernando's Hideaway/Doxology are Long Meter: 8,8,8,8 while Amazing Grace is Common Meter 8,6,8,6. It's not that hard to fit AG to the LM tunes with some extra slurs, but you tend to run out of notes when you reverse the process.

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: GUEST,.gargoyle
Date: 13 Dec 04 - 10:10 PM

Many verses of Emily Dickenson go zero to the bone.

Sincerely,
Gargoyle

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: DADGBE
Date: 14 Dec 04 - 12:26 AM

The theme from the American TV show, Gilliagn's Island seems to fit.

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: Splott Man
Date: 14 Dec 04 - 03:57 AM

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer works too.

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From:
Date: 01 Mar 05 - 05:01 PM

Does anyone know the "Amazing Grace" lyrics that can be sung to the tune of Danny Boy (Londonderry Air)? I am looking for sacred lyrics to this tune that are appropriate to the Lenten season. Thanks.

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: Burke
Date: 01 Mar 05 - 05:40 PM

See THIS THREAD for Danny Boy/Air from Derry hymn words.

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: open mike
Date: 01 Mar 05 - 06:33 PM

air from Derry = Derriere?

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: Stephen R.
Date: 01 Mar 05 - 06:39 PM

Gargoyle, Garrison Keillor beat you to it--some years ago he sang "Because I could not stop for Death' to the tune of 'The Yellow Rose of Texas'.

Stephen

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: BanjoRay
Date: 01 Mar 05 - 08:30 PM

Uncle DaveO - Debby McClatchy uses a lovely modal tune she wrote herself.
Cheers
Ray

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: frogprince
Date: 01 Mar 05 - 08:55 PM

My wife has sung it in church to the tune "The Water is Wide"; actually very pretty. It takes as little very simple adaption, as "I once was blind, but now I see". We added one verse:

    Though grace may grow familiar now
    Like any song, sung one old way
    Lord, touch my heart, lest I forget
    Your grace is new, each breaking day.

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: GUEST,Georgiemay
Date: 21 Mar 05 - 09:27 PM

Does anyone know where I could find a Recording of Amazing Grace to the Gilligan Island theme song?
Also did you Know that you can sing Amazing Grace to the 1971 coke a cola song and the eagles take it easy.

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: Wincing Devil
Date: 21 Mar 05 - 09:57 PM

The Corsairs (Pirate/Shanty singers from texas) have a hidden track on on of their albums, where they do Amazing Grace to just about everything, including the Theme from the TV Show Dallas

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: GUEST,Twicecalledson
Date: 23 Nov 10 - 11:53 AM

You can sing it to Peter, Paul and MAry's Puff the Magic Dragon

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: fretless
Date: 23 Nov 10 - 12:32 PM

My daughter learned the Gilligan's Island version at church camp. I've never heard it on a recording, though.

Amazing Grace also works perfectly to the tune of Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and vice-versa. I learned that one years ago at a St. Royster's Day celebration at Ranger Steve's house.

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: EBarnacle
Date: 23 Nov 10 - 01:50 PM

In one of Dewey Lambdin's books [I will present the exact citation in a later post, He has the crew of the frigate Proteus, under the command of Alan Lewrie in 1799 singing it to another hymn. The footnote is that the melody was not regularized to the commonly known one until about 1807 +/-.

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: EBarnacle
Date: 23 Nov 10 - 03:28 PM

The name of the book is "A King's Trade."

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: Joybell
Date: 23 Nov 10 - 03:39 PM

"All songs will sound the same when they call out your name
In that small-town talent quest up in the sky."
Mike O'Rouke. (Australia) From "This Song is a Cross"

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: GUEST,lenorebeadsman
Date: 17 Apr 11 - 05:36 PM

"I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" (Hank Williams) works quite well!

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: Art Thieme
Date: 17 Apr 11 - 06:32 PM

The theme from the TV show Gilligan's Island works perfectly.

Art Thieme

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: Jack Campin
Date: 02 Apr 16 - 05:31 AM

I just found a snippet from the Scottish paper "The People's Journal", no date. It's a letter to the editor, and says:

Reference to "Amazing Grace" in today's "The People's Journal". The hymn is to be found, No.231, in the original "Sacred Songs and Solos", compiled by Ira D. Sankey. It is sung to the psalm tune Warwick and was composed from the text II. Corinthians 4, 15. - A "Journal" Reader, Beauly.

"Warwick" is nothing like the familiar tune.

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: GUEST,(hey, where did that cookie go) BobL
Date: 03 Apr 16 - 05:51 AM

Common Metre. The classic example is "While Shepherds Watched" - if a tune fits that, it will fit "Amazing Grace", e.g. Auld Lang Syne, House of the Rising Sun, Crimond and hundreds more.

Rudolph & Puff are not Common Metre, and don't work unless mucked about.

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: Mr Red
Date: 03 Apr 16 - 07:26 AM

Alan & John Lomax's enormous tome had a version with a chorus. I would bet it is on the on-line new archive at the Library of Congress

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: Megan L
Date: 03 Apr 16 - 10:17 AM

found this site when trying to remember warick A bit jazzy for me but a good metre resource

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: GUEST
Date: 03 Apr 16 - 04:23 PM

Teddy Bears' Picnic should fit.

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: Jack Campin
Date: 03 Apr 16 - 07:34 PM

The pojnt I was making was not what you could sing it to, but what people actually did sing it to. Here is somebody writing from Scotland some time around 1900 saying that the standard tune is something most of us today have never heard.

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: Mr Red
Date: 04 Apr 16 - 03:34 AM

My broadband worked long enough to find this Library of Congress Lomax Iconic Song list (third on the list)

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: GUEST,Rob K
Date: 16 Oct 16 - 05:54 PM

The Hymn Book of the Countess of Huntingdon's Church of 1808 was printed with Amazing Grace set to John Husband's tune 'Hephzibah', which, I think, captures the sentiments of John Newton's splendid hymn of joy far better than the morose dirge known as 'New Britain' which did not appear until 1831. Prior to that the hymn would have been sung to any Common Metre tune that people knew from singing the various versions of the metric psalms.

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: clueless don
Date: 17 Oct 16 - 09:42 AM

I have had a theory (maybe it's just a hypothesis [an hypothesis???] at this point) that any song can be sung either to I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General or to When I was a Lad (and Now I am the Leader of the Queen's Navy) - sometimes to both. Amazing Grace seems to fit nicely with Major General. Not so well with When I was a Lad, though it can work with some shoehorning.

Don

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: Teribus
Date: 17 Oct 16 - 10:47 AM

Alastair McDonald sings Amazing Grace to the tune of Robert Burns "My Love is like a red, red Rose"

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: GUEST,Samuel J. Hardman
Date: 21 Jul 18 - 05:11 PM

Many thanks. The famous melody we now associate with "Amazing Grace" first appeared in "Columbian Harmony" in 1829,
and also in "The Virginia Harmony" in 1831. However, the melody was first "married" to John Newton's "Amazing Grace" in William ("Singing Billy") Walker's "The Southern Harmony" in 1835. Indeed, this must have been a marriage made in heaven!

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: keberoxu
Date: 22 Jul 18 - 10:55 PM

Come back, Masato!
I recall hearing the
Blind Boys of Alabama snippet
on national public radio.
Riveting.

But then,
they are the Blind Boys of Alabama
and they could make
the telephone directory sound riveting.

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: GUEST
Date: 30 Jul 20 - 12:48 PM

I had a youth choir back in the late 70s that would sing the words to Amazing Grace to the Coca-Cola song that was popular back then. I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing......

Subject: RE: Melodies for Amazing Grace
From: clueless don
Date: 31 Jul 20 - 06:34 AM

Thank you, GUEST! That's delightful.