On Juneteenth this year, I spent a few hours in a small country church that was built about 100 years ago. It’s Presbyterian, rests on a slight rise an acre or so off the main road in Rock Island, Tennessee, a tiny town in rural Warren County. The church is lovely: austere, almost purely white, with little ornamentation and no stained glass, so that the caramel-colored wooden cross, pulpit and pews are the chief focus. Its marquee reads, in part, “Everyone Welcome.” A friend, Rachel Wingo of the Bryan Symphony Orchestra, and I were there to talk with a book club about a native son, composer and professor Charles Faulkner Bryan, who grew up in this county. Charles had probably been in this church when it was new.

 

A close friend of Charles’s, bass-baritone J. Robert Bradley, may or may not have visited the church. During his long career with the predominantly African American National Baptist Convention USA, Robert became known as a periodic ambassador to White churches in America. He toured six continents over 50 years, singing spirituals, hymns and gospel from NBC hymnals and songbooks. National Baptists remember and revere him, especially for his majestic rendering of the hymn “Amazing Grace.” 

 

“In London,” he told me in an interview a few years before he died, “I sang ‘Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound.’ I told them I’m singing one of your son’s songs, reared in England. It took a lot of nerve. I couldn’t help it; it was in me and I just let it out. ‘Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now I’m found, blind but now I see.’ And that became my theme song in America for a while. They’d say Amazing Grace is coming to sing – not Robert Bradley, but Amazing Grace.” 

 

Sometimes called America’s spiritual national anthem, “Amazing Grace” was written by an English clergyman in 1772 and published in a hymnal five years later. The composer, John Newton, lived a tumultuous life. A self-proclaimed sinner of some magnitude, he fought the weight of religion, found no interest in a deity. Forcibly pressed into naval service, he worked aboard ships for almost 20 years. Along the way, he converted – inspired by near death in an epic storm -- and began a more studied and devout life. But when offered the captaincy of slave ships, he did not say no, and ended his career on the seas with three voyages transporting enslaved Africans to American and Caribbean shores. Illness, privilege and what he would come to call “amazing grace” finally sobered this dissolute man. He became a minister, hymn writer and, much later in his life, promoted the abolitionist cause in England.

 

Once published, “Amazing Grace” spread like wildfire, reaching our shores in 1789. In its first few decades, before recording devices and radio, the hymn’s original tune was lost, and church and school song leaders began attaching the text to other melodies – ones more familiar to Americans. But in 1835, a Southern singing master and folk music publisher, William Walker, paired it with a melody he named “New Britain” and published the arrangement in a tune book called Southern Harmony. In the decades to come, other music publishers paired John Newton’s lyrics with various other melodies, but it was “New Britain” that stuck, and today, it’s hard to imagine any other version. 

 

Music historian Steve Turner believes the song’s resonance hails from its universal message: that in times of great pain and strife, there is still an opportunity for comfort and hope. That’s why the song has become such a fixture at funeral services, part of our soundtrack in the aftermath of national tragedies including presidential death and assassination, mass shootings, and terrorist attacks including the Oklahoma City bombing and 9-11. I see grace as unexpected clarity easing a confused and suffering soul. Whether you believe in a higher power or simply have faith in the resilience of the human mind, grace applies. 

 

In 1938, Charles met Robert at St. Mary’s Baptist Church-Colored in McMinnville, not far from Rock Island. Robert had come to town to sing at a week-long revival. He was just 17, but already being touted as a virtuoso, and when Charles heard about the revival, he and his wife, Edith, attended an evening song and worship service, intent on hearing this young man for themselves. Charles was flabbergasted by the power of Robert’s voice and offered to give him voice lessons in his studio at the small white segregated college nearby where he taught. Thus began a relationship between the two men that would last the rest of Charles’s days. 

 

Those days, alas, were short, but Charles left behind an astonishing number of hymns, art songs, cantatas and other choral works, as well as one symphony. Its second movement quotes the spiritual “Goin’ Over Jordan” (which is known by most of us today as “Wayfaring Stranger”) and the hymn “Amazing Grace.” He co-wrote several scores for musical theater, one of them based on the life of William Walker called “Singin’ Billy,” which was considered for a performance on NBC Television’s Opera Theatre.

 

So, in the Presbyterian church on Juneteenth, my friend Rachel and I told some of these stories to the 60 or 70 members of the book club who welcomed us and seemed to enjoy the glimpse we gave them of the lives of not only their native son Charles Bryan, but also his dear friend Robert Bradley. Several of the people there had studied under Edith Bryan in high school and remembered the stories she told over the years of her late husband’s work – and his friendship with Robert. 

 

The day coincided with a summer music camp called “Bach on the Rock” for post-graduate string studies. The program’s founder and violist, Caty Dalton, and her husband, cellist Max Hanks, attended our talk that day and with the church pianist, Timea Bodi, performed two songs, including “Amazing Grace” in honor of Charles and, as they were to learn, Robert. The trio led us as we sang the first stanza and, as far as I could see, no one needed to pull out a hymnal. 

 

Groundbreaking gospel historian Anthony Heilbut says that “Amazing Grace” is the most popular hymn in American churches – all denominations, all cultures, Black and White, Southern and Northern. It never caught on in England the way it did here. In the beginning, its message hit closest to home in the American South, where White people suffered the self-inflicted consequences of slavery and the Civil War, and Black people prayed for release. Over time, it entered the national consciousness in often secular fashion, so that its promise of relief from whatever “dangers, toils and snares” entrapped us was no longer confined to churches.

 

Send Amazing Grace! parishioners would cry out, inviting J. Robert Bradley to sing. In these days of peril and strife, to believe in the possibility of grace feels amazing and hopeful – and available to all of us, regardless of race or religion, gender or class. People can change.

 

12 July 2024