SpringFestival

Many people mistakenly assume that when Elvis belted out, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog/Cryin’ all the time” and other tunes in 1956, he became the first white entertainer to perform black music to white audiences.
There are two major errors in that idea. The first is that even a quick study leads to white jazz players long before Elvis sang rock ‘n’ roll. For example, Elvis may have been “the King,” but the earlier “King of Swing” was the famous (and white) Benny Goodman. Goodman used the arrangements of Fletcher Henderson, a black orchestra leader from Cuthbert, Georgia, who invented Swing in the early ‘30s. There were dozens of other white “black entertainers” who pre-dated Elvis.
The bigger error, however, is that Elvis was singing black music. It is true that rock ‘n’ roll began its life as a “white” rhythm-and-blues. Even so, R&B, jazz, Swing, blues, and all the rest are blends of the music of both blacks and whites.
This is one theme of this series: American popular music is a blend of African and British folk music (and some European middle and upper class music), which necessarily coincided with the advent of the Protestant hymn in the late 1700s.
The hymn-blend began in the South about 1800 and could not have happened elsewhere—-not Los Angeles, not New York, not Detroit, not Rio, not London, not Dakar, and certainly not Vienna. Yet, there is hardly a corner of the world today that is not filled with modern interpretations of the basic Southern formula. It is the most thorough of revolutions.
To American Protestants, Amazing Grace is as familiar a tune as there is. However, for the rest of the world, it hasn’t always been so. The folk singer, Judy Collins, released her version of the song in 1970, ranking #15 on the pop charts. From that point on, Amazing Grace has become the world’s most popular religious tune.
The journalist Bill Moyers prepared a public television program on the song in 1989. He interviewed Collins, opera singer Jessye Norman, shape note singers Hugh McGraw and Dewey Williams, and country music legend Johnny Cash.
Jessye Norman sang the song in the Baptist Church of her youth in Augusta, Georgia. As an internationally acclaimed soprano, in the 1980s she sang it at a rock concert to benefit the freedom fight of Nelson Mandela.
Hugh McGraw, of Bremen, Georgia, has been to Westville numerous times for shape note singings. In the Moyers video, he noted that the song, known to shape note singers as New Britain, is sung by them essentially as it was in the tune’s beginning.
Dewey Williams, of Ozark, Alabama, was the grandson of a slave. Moore recalled that his grandfather “raised” Amazing Grace for the shape note singers. Moore and his Wiregrass Sacred Harp Singers demonstrated the rhythms that African-Americans give the tune, which are very different from those of white singers.
Johnny Cash sang at prisons early in his career of country music. He said that in the three minutes that it takes to sing Amazing Grace, everyone is free. “[It] is a song that has no guile,” said Cash. “Those lyrics are straight ahead, honest, gut-level, and hard-level. When I sing that song, I could be in a dungeon, or have chains all over me, but I’d be free as a breeze. It’s a song that makes a difference. There are some songs that make a difference in your life, and that song makes a difference.”