Amazing grace;y is it i thought this song was written by an slave but stolen by the slave master john newton?

No, not at all.





There are many urban legends about this hymn. You are repeating one of them.





First, the lyrics had nothing directly to do with slavery and the slave trade, though by the 1780s, years after he had written these words, Newton would no doubt have said that his activity as a slave trader WAS part of his being ';a wretch';.





These most famous lyrics of John Newton first appeared in print in 1779 with many others he and his friend William Cowper had written in their *Olney Hymns*. He called this one ';Faith's Review and Expectation';, and listed with it a Scripture text - 1 Chronicles 17:16-17. Since we have Newton's own notes for a sermon he preached on New Year's Day, 1773 on this very text, and can see that the flow of the sermon matches that of the hymn, it is fairly certain he wrote these lyrics at that time, while preparing the sermon.





(We also know it was a common practice for Newton to write a set of hymn lyrics reflecting on a Scripture passage while preparing to preach on it. He later shared these with people as he discovered they remembered the lyrics better than his sermons!)





Note that there is no allusion to the slaver trade in these lyrics, which Newton wrote some eighteen years after leaving his slave ship.


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Some who suggest that Newton borrowed the tune from slaves apparently are referring to the TUNE, not the lyrics. But it must be noted that Newton never wrote, nor claimed to write, any tune for his lyrics. They were written in a very common metrical pattern (this one even called ';Common Meter';) so that they could be sung to MANY different tunes, as was the practice with hymn lyrics generally. (Lyrics at the time were typically printed separately from the tunes).





In fact, that is exactly what happened. Indeed, the tune now most often used for the hymn were probably not used for it till about 1830 (long after Newton's death), and in America, not Britain. The first known publication of these words and tune together came in 1835. And this tune may not have become the most popular tune for the hymn until the early twentieth century when a hymn writer who wrote an arrangement of the tune, published the hymn in a series.





At any rate, this tune --which again had nothing to do with Newton-- appears to simply be an adaptation of a (Scotch-Irish?) folk tune around in the early 19th century. There is no known connection with or influence by slaves. That PARTICULAR connection, I suspect, began when the words of the hymn (slightly changed) appeared in Harriet Beecher Stowe's *Uncle Tom's Cabin* (1852), in the mouth of the main character.


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For more details on this story see the following links:





the story of Newton and the hymn


http://www.reformedreader.org/rbb/newton鈥?/a>





the sermon notes


http://www.johnnewton.org/Group/Group.as鈥?/a>





the sermon text


http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?sea鈥?/a>





see also:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazing_Gra鈥?/a>Amazing grace;y is it i thought this song was written by an slave but stolen by the slave master john newton?
The music is an old Scottish dirge entitled: ';On the Death of a Highland Chieftain';. That's why it's played at military, police and firefighter funerals. Lyrics were added to the tune and it became known as ';Amazing Grace';. Since there were no black slaves in Scotland, it's doubtful that the song was written by a slave.