Moyers Analyzes Appeal of ‘Amazing Grace’

H ow sweet the sound of a truly moving melody. Concerned parents, critics, generals and protest activists--all would agree that there is transforming power in music. But can one solitary song, in and of itself, actually change lives en masse?

Bill Moyers is hard-pressed to ascribe that much power to any song he knows of but one.

“I heard ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ at Robert Kennedy’s funeral, and I saw how that occasion lifted people from beyond themselves,” says Moyers, who worked in the Johnson Administration before achieving fame as a TV journalist. “But I don’t think I’d ever seen a song about which so many people confessed that it had actually transformed their seeing, their feeling, their way of looking at themselves and the world, as ‘Amazing Grace.’ ”

Armed with the belief that slave-trader-cum-minister John Newton’s 19th-Century hymn is the most extraordinary composition known to our generation, and the knowledge that it remains the most recorded melody of the sound era, Moyers embarked on a mission to trace its impact--from the abolition movement to the civil rights movement and beyond--with a feature-length documentary film of the same name. Full of English history and modern Americana, Moyers’ “Amazing Grace” has its local premiere tonight at 9 as part of the AFI Film Festival in Century City.

Certainly unlike any other hymn, “Amazing Grace” has taken on a hugely secular as well as religious life, moving beyond the Protestant church into the popular culture. Judy Collins, interviewed in the film, had a Top 20 single with it in 1970. Opera singer Jessye Norman, likewise included in the documentary, hushed a rowdy rock throng at the Nelson Mandela birthday celebration two years ago in England by singing it a cappella. Decidedly non-churchy rock and country performers regularly include it in their acts.

“Somewhere in some boundary indefinable, it connects the sacred and secular orders,” said Moyers by phone from his New York office, in advance of his trip to Los Angeles for tonight’s post-screening discussion.

“It is truly a new country there. I think there’s been a kind of stuttering start--and the Joseph Campbell series (“The Power of Myth”) was part of this--of a deep and vital inquiry into the meaning of spiritual life in America today. And it’s neither wholly spiritual nor wholly secular. And there are some hymns and poems that transcend either of those heretofore clearly defined boundaries. It’s not church, but it’s not ‘street,’ either.”

The hymn’s crossover appeal lies in the fact that “it contains no ecclesiastical doctrine known as such,” said Moyers. “No single denomination has proprietary claim to it. It evokes something from people rather than telling something to people. And what it evokes, I think, is simply that commonality of interest in the sublime that is a part of everyone’s experience, I think, even if it cannot be articulated in theological language.”

Included in the film are interviews with a number of African Americans who are initially taken aback to learn that the hymn’s composer was, in fact, a slave-ship captain before his conversion. Later, after he became a minister of the Church of England and denounced slavery as an evil, his diaries from that time became “perhaps the most important source of information about the slave trade for the abolition movement,” Moyers noted.

“It was news to many” of the blacks he interviewed, “but they somehow didn’t seem surprised. Again, I think that’s part of the recognition that this is a hymn that came from other than routine sources. I think they understood that there was some kind of power to it that they hadn’t perceived before, which is actually why it spoke to them so incredibly, so richly.”

Over the course of 87 minutes, viewers are exposed to Newton’s hymn dozens of times in dozens of wildly varying versions. Working on the documentary over the course of the last two years, Moyers necessarily heard it hundreds more times. Even the most graceless curmudgeon would have to acknowledge the song’s inherent, lasting power, but honestly, now--did Moyers never think at some point in the work that perhaps that he might not want to ever again hear some small-town soprano sing of the grace that saved a wretch like Newton?

“No, I am being honest with you, I did not tire of it,” said Moyers. “There are so many variations of it, and once you move beyond just simply the wonder at that, you begin to listen to the different inflections and the different styles. And so it’s an endless study in the kaleidoscopic qualities of a powerful song and of music itself.”

Though “Amazing Grace” will air on Moyers’ home network, PBS, in the fall, it is unlike most of his projects in that it will be seen to some extent on the big screen--thanks to the urging of friend Norman Lear, who urged Moyers to exhibit it at festivals and in limited theatrical runs as “a community experience” greater than the “isolated experience” of television.

“Essentially, it’s a political film in one sense,” said Moyers, “because it does create a momentary sense of a community, and that’s what the best politics does.”

This project also differs from Moyers’ others in that it includes no narration.

“Not a line. But the people tell the story, and I’m simply carried along with it as a kind of unacknowledged accomplice. You always have to have a storyteller when you’re telling a story, but the storyteller doesn’t always have to tell the story. In television in particular, the storyteller can simply be a quiet presence around whom people organize their thoughts. We realized from the beginning that this would need no narration if we produced and directed it appropriately.”

Moyers has been the source of some controversy in recent years among certain segments of the church community, with accusations from some that “Politics and God” unfairly portrayed biblical inerrantists in the Baptist camp or that “The Power of Myth” promulgated New Age thought.

“I come out of the evangelical tradition and know them much more than I come out of the fundamentalist tradition, and many evangelicals responded affirmatively to Campbell because they thought he was acknowledging the power of ritual and symbol in our experience,” said Moyers. “But fundamentalists who like to reduce everything to the jot and tittle weren’t that appreciative.”

Does he expect, then, to get back in their good graces, no pun intended, with this latest project?

“Probably not. Because I’m not evangelizing, I’m not trying to make converts, I’m not trying to win souls, I’m not trying to promote a dogma. And there’s nothing in the film that would restrict it to an exclusively Christian community.”