[1][2][3] Newton wrote the words from personal experience; he grew up without any particular religious conviction, but his life's path was formed by a variety of twists and coincidences that were often put into motion by others' reactions to what they took as his recalcitrant insubordination.

In the United States, "Amazing Grace" became a popular song used by Baptist and Methodist preachers as part of their evangelizing, especially in the American South, during the Second Great Awakening of the early 19th century.

With the message that forgiveness and redemption are possible regardless of sins committed and that the soul can be delivered from despair through the mercy of God, "Amazing Grace" is one of the most recognisable songs in the English-speaking world.

American historian Gilbert Chase writes that it is "without a doubt the most famous of all the folk hymns"[4] and Jonathan Aitken, a Newton biographer, estimates that the song is performed about 10 million times annually.

In a culture where sailors habitually swore, Newton was admonished several times for not only using the worst words the captain had ever heard, but creating new ones to exceed the limits of verbal debauchery.

William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth, impressed with his story, sponsored Newton for ordination by John Green, Bishop of Lincoln, and offered him the curacy of Olney, Buckinghamshire, in 1764.

[25] He struck a friendship with William Cowper, a gifted writer who had failed at a career in law and suffered bouts of insanity, attempting suicide several times.

[31] Jonathan Aitken calls Newton, specifically referring to "Amazing Grace", an "unashamedly middlebrow lyricist writing for a lowbrow congregation", noting that only twenty-one of the nearly 150 words used in all six verses have more than one syllable.

According to Newton, unconverted sinners were "blinded by the god of this world" until "mercy came to us not only undeserved but undesired ... our hearts endeavored to shut him out till he overcame us by the power of his grace.

The greatest influences in the 19th century that propelled "Amazing Grace" to spread across the US and become a staple of religious services in many denominations and regions were the Second Great Awakening and the development of shape note singing communities.

Unprecedented gatherings of thousands of people attended camp meetings where they came to experience salvation; preaching was fiery and focused on saving the sinner from temptation and backsliding.

[45] Religion was stripped of ornament and ceremony, and made as plain and simple as possible; sermons and songs often used repetition to get across to a rural population of poor and mostly uneducated people the necessity of turning away from sin.

The first known instance of Newton's lines joined to music was in A Companion to the Countess of Huntingdon's Hymns (London, 1808), where it is set to the tune "Hephzibah" by English composer John Jenkins Husband.

[47] Common meter hymns were interchangeable with a variety of tunes; more than twenty musical settings of "Amazing Grace" circulated with varying popularity until 1835, when American composer William Walker assigned Newton's words to a traditional song named "New Britain".

[50] "Amazing Grace", with the words written by Newton and joined with "New Britain", the melody most currently associated with it, appeared for the first time in Walker's shape note tunebook Southern Harmony in 1847.

It was one of between 50 and 70 verses of a song titled "Jerusalem, My Happy Home", which was first published in a 1790 book called A Collection of Sacred Ballads: When we've been there ten thousand years, Bright shining as the sun, We've no less days to sing God's praise, Than when we first begun.

[55][56] "Amazing Grace" came to be an emblem of a Christian movement and a symbol of the US itself as the country was involved in a great political experiment, attempting to employ democracy as a means of government.

Primitive Baptists in the Appalachian region often used "New Britain" with other hymns, and sometimes sing the words of "Amazing Grace" to other folk songs, including titles such as "In the Pines", "Pisgah", "Primrose", and "Evan", as all are able to be sung in common meter, of which the majority of their repertoire consists.

Two musical arrangers named Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey heralded another religious revival in the cities of the US and Europe, giving the song international exposure.

Several editions featuring Newton's first three stanzas and the verse previously included by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin were published by Excell between 1900 and 1910.

Where Edwin Othello Excell sought to make the singing of "Amazing Grace" uniform throughout thousands of churches, records allowed artists to improvise with the words and music specific to each audience.

[71] Author James Basker states that the song has been employed by African Americans as the "paradigmatic Negro spiritual" because it expresses the joy felt at being delivered from slavery and worldly miseries.

Mahalia Jackson employed "Amazing Grace" for Civil Rights marchers, writing that she used it "to give magical protection – a charm to ward off danger, an incantation to the angels of heaven to descend ...

"[73] Folk singer Judy Collins, who knew the song before she could remember learning it, witnessed Fannie Lou Hamer leading marchers in Mississippi in 1964, singing "Amazing Grace".

[75] Collins decided to record it in the late 1960s amid an atmosphere of counterculture introspection; she was part of an encounter group that ended a contentious meeting by singing "Amazing Grace" as it was the only song to which all the members knew the words.

[81] In 1972, the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, the senior Scottish regiment of the British Army, recorded an instrumental version featuring a bagpipe soloist accompanied by a pipe band.

[87] Johnny Cash recorded it on his 1975 album Sings Precious Memories, dedicating it to his older brother Jack, who had been killed in a mill accident when they were boys in Dyess, Arkansas.

More contemporary renditions include samples from such popular artists as Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers (1963), the Byrds (1970), Elvis Presley (1971), Skeeter Davis (1972), Mighty Clouds of Joy (1972), Amazing Rhythm Aces (1975), Willie Nelson (1976) and the Lemonheads (1992).

Newton's Calvinistic view of redemption and divine grace formed his perspective that he considered himself a sinner so vile that he was unable to change his life or be redeemed without God's help.

Moyers was inspired to focus on the song's power after watching a performance at Lincoln Center, where the audience consisted of Christians and non-Christians, and he noticed that it had an equal impact on everybody in attendance, unifying them.