" Amazing Grace " is a Christian hymn with words written by the English poet and clergyman John Newton ( 1725 – 1807 ), published in 1779.

Containing a 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 recognizable songs in the English-speaking world.

" Amazing Grace " was written to illustrate a sermon on New Year's Day of 1773.

In the United States however, " Amazing Grace " was used extensively during the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century.

Author Gilbert Chase writes that " Amazing Grace " is " without a doubt the most famous of all the folk hymns ," and Jonathan Aitken, a Newton biographer, estimates that it is performed about 10 million times annually.

" Amazing Grace " saw a resurgence in popularity in the U. S. during the 1960s and has been recorded thousands of times during and since the 20th century, occasionally appearing on popular music charts.

According to the Dictionary of American Hymnology, " Amazing Grace " is John Newton's spiritual autobiography in verse.

The greatest influences in the 19th century that propelled " Amazing Grace " to spread across the U. S. 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.

" Amazing Grace " was one of many hymns that punctuated fervent sermons, although the contemporary style used a refrain, borrowed from other hymns, that employed simplicity and repetition such as:

William Walker ( composer ) | William Walker, the composer who first joined John Newton's verses to " New Britain ", to create the song that has become " Amazing Grace "

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 William Walker assigned Newton's words to a traditional song named " New Britain ", which was itself an amalgamation of two melodies (" Gallaher " and " St. Mary ") first published in the Columbian Harmony by Charles H. Spilman and Benjamin Shaw ( Cincinnati, 1829 ).

" 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.

" Amazing Grace " came to be an emblem of a religious movement and a symbol of the U. S. itself as the country was involved in a great political experiment, attempting to employ democracy as a means of government.

" Amazing Grace " set to " New Britain " was included in two hymnals distributed to soldiers and with death so real and imminent, religious services in the military became commonplace.

Although " Amazing Grace " set to " New Britain " was popular, other versions existed regionally.

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.

Moody and Sankey began publishing their compositions in 1875, and " Amazing Grace " appeared three times with three different melodies, but they were the first to give it its title ; hymns were typically published using the first line of the lyrics, or the name of the tune such as " New Britain ".

A publisher named Edwin Othello Excell gave the version of " Amazing Grace " set to " New Britain " immense popularity by publishing it in a series of hymnals that were used in urban churches.

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, and his version of " Amazing Grace " became the standard form of the song in American churches.

With the advent of recorded music and radio, " Amazing Grace " began to cross over from primarily a gospel standard to secular audiences.

The ability to record combined with the marketing of records to specific audiences allowed " Amazing Grace " to take on thousands of different forms in the 20th century.

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.

" Amazing Grace " is emblematic of several kinds of folk music styles, often used as the standard example to illustrate such musical techniques as lining out and call and response, that have been practiced in both black and white folk music.

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 ...

" 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 ".

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.

There was nothing left to do, I thought ... but sing ' Amazing Grace '.

The science-fiction editor Gardner Dozois is generally acknowledged as the person who popularized the use of the term " cyberpunk " as a kind of literature, although Minnesota writer Bruce Bethke coined the term in 1980 for his short story " Cyberpunk ," which was published in the November 1983 issue of Amazing Science Fiction Stories.

Jeron Criswell King ( August 18, 1907 – October 4, 1982 ), born Jeron Criswell Konig, and known by his stage-name The Amazing Criswell (), was an American psychic known for wildly inaccurate predictions.

This was later released as Metamorphosis Alpha to Omega using the Amazing Engine Rules.

He was the author of many hymns, including " Amazing Grace " and " Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken.

Randi began his career as a magician named The Amazing Randi, but after retiring at age 60, he was able to devote most of his time to investigating paranormal, occult, and supernatural claims, which he collectively calls " woo-woo ".

For example, Spider-Man's high school graduation was published in Amazing Spider-Man # 28 ( September 1965 ), his college graduation in Amazing Spider-Man # 185 ( October 1978 ), and his high school reunion in Marvel Knights: Spider-Man # 7 ( December 2004 ).

The 1928 publication of Philip Nolan's original Buck Rogers story, Armageddon 2419, in Amazing Stories was a landmark event.

In 2007, Gellar was featured in Vaseline's " Skin Is Amazing " campaign, with other actors such as Hilary Duff, Amanda Bynes, and John Leguizamo.

* Episode 2 of the first season of The Amazing Race was not aired on the evening of September 12 as scheduled.

* The Savage Land was referenced in the Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends episode " The Hunter and the Hunted.

In early 1963, with the success of Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy, The Incredible Hulk, The Mighty Thor, Iron Man, and The Fantastic Four, creator Stan Lee devised the series title after Marvel publisher Martin Goodman turned down the initial name, " The Mutants ", stating that readers would not know what a " mutant " was.

Reality shows with low ratings included The Amazing Race, Lost ( unrelated to the better-known serial drama of the same name ) and The Mole, leading some to speculate that reality television was a temporary fad that had run its course.

Kathleen Norris in her book Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith characterizes this transformation of the original words as " wretched English " making the line that replaces the original " laughably bland ".

Today around six of the original 348 Olney Hymns regularly feature in modern church worship, the most famous of which is " Amazing Grace ".

Kurt Busiek took a similar approach with Untold Tales of Spider-Man, a series which told stories that specifically fit between issues of the original The Amazing Spider-Man series, sometimes explaining discontinuities between those earlier stories.

Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends is an American animated television series produced by Marvel Productions starring established Marvel Comics characters Spider-Man and Iceman and an original character, Firestar.

In " Spidey Cents ", a fourth season episode of the History reality television series Pawn Stars, which aired in May 2011, a man tries to sell McFarlane's original artwork for page 25 of The Amazing Spider-Man # 316 ( June 1989 ) for $ 20, 000 to the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop in Las Vegas.

Cassidy, in turn, was himself a replacement for the lead in the original 1982 Broadway production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

In Amazing Fantasy # 15, the original version of the phrase appears in a narrative caption in the comic's last panel, not as spoken dialogue.

The track was originally called " The Amazing Pudding ", though Ron Geesin's original score referred to it as " Epic ".

In the original Spider-Man cartoon, Mary Jane appears in the episode The Big Brainwasher ( based on The Amazing Spider-Man # 59-61 ).

Reference to her original debut in the panel of The Amazing Spider-Man # 42.

The CD, recorded at Paradise Studios in South Central Indiana, featured all original tracks as well as a re-imagined version of " Amazing grace " as a closer, with the hymn " Blind man " as a hidden track.

The cover to # 15 was a revamped version of the original Amazing Fantasy # 15 cover, complete with Spider-Man swinging through a modern-day New York City, while the new heroes watch in awe in the background.

Of the seven, " The Amazing Chipmunks ", which originally aired alongside " The Wall ", is extremely hard to find in its original English language.

At 23, she co-produced her first Broadway show, the original Broadway production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which went on to garner seven Tony Award nominations.

The original version of the song, which runs 4: 03 in length, features in the animated film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, along with other Radiohead songs, the B-side " The Amazing Sounds of Orgy " and " Skttrbrain ( Four Tet RMX )".

Daniel John " Dan " Gilvezan ( born October 26, 1950 ) is an American actor, best known as the voice of Peter Parker / Spider-Man in the 1981 animated series, Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and the voice of the Autobots Bumblebee, Outback and Hot Spot and the Decepticon Snapdragon in the original 1984-1987 Transformers series.

The original incarnation of the group was organized by Doctor Octopus, and first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man Annual # 1 ( 1964 ).

Aside from McGregor, with whom the character became as associated as Howard the Duck with Steve Gerber or Tomb of Dracula with Marv Wolfman, other writers include Bill Mantlo ( a fill-in Amazing Adventures and a Marvel Team-Up with Killraven and a future-flung Spider-Man ); Joe Linsner ( a 2001 Marvel Knights one-shot, Killraven, set in 2020 New York City, at odds with the original series ' locale by that fictional year ); and Alan Davis ( also artist ), in a 2002 parallel universe miniseries, Killraven vol.

Roquat, having regained his original name, is the villain of The Oz-Wonderland War, published by DC Comics and starring Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew.

Yoda released his debut album of original material, entitled The Amazing Adventures of DJ Yoda, on 2 October 2006 on Antidote Records.

The Race returned to the original teams of two adults for The Amazing Race 9.

The original name of the BBS was " The Amazing Captain Neato ( TACN ) BBS.