Amazing Grace

Notes from Tom

You can sing the original "Amazing Grace" to this tune. People do. But the tune is "House of the Rising Sun," and the words are new.

Where the tune came from

I first heard the two put together about six years ago. My friend Gus Koutia, a fantastic guitarist and singer who came to the United States from Lebanon, was playing in the band at our annual men's conference, and he sang the original "Amazing Grace" to "House of the Rising Sun." The two fit each other like they had been written together. I liked it a lot, and it stayed with me.

So why change the words?

I don't really think of it as changing the words. I think of it as a new song. I'm not trying to compete with a hymn that has as much weight behind it as "Amazing Grace," and I couldn't if I wanted to.

But something has always bothered me about that hymn. Actually, it bothered my father more. He was a pastor, and he was the one who told me how much he disliked it, and why.

It never mentions Jesus. It never says where the grace comes from. And that is exactly why "Amazing Grace" can be sung by people who aren't Christians, and is. You can make it fit nearly any religious view you hold. Some people find that appealing. It feels generous and ecumenical. To me it runs straight against what Jesus Himself said: "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."

So this song does the one thing the original never does. It says where the grace comes from. Not from my works, my strength, or even my own faith, but from Christ alone: through His Word and the water of baptism, from His cross and His empty tomb, in His body and blood that sustain us through every trial, and at the last, around His throne. Amazing grace comes to us one way. Through Christ.

A note on the music

The tune has no composer and no proper name. "House of the Rising Sun" is an old American folk song, probably out of Appalachia, first recorded in the early 1930s and written down by Alan Lomax in 1937 from a Kentucky girl named Georgia Turner. Bob Dylan recorded it on his first album in 1962, just voice and guitar. Two years later the Animals cut the electric version with the organ, and it went to number one. Dylan said he heard it on his car radio and it stopped him cold; it's one of the things that pushed him to plug in the next year. The melody is that one, played the way Gus played it: a picked acoustic guitar, amplified, and not much else. No organ. That slow, rolling minor key gives the words a weight the familiar tune doesn't have. The song ends where it began, with the first verse sung once more, because that is the whole point: not by my works, but Christ alone.