Below is a clip from featuring Wintley Phipps, President of the US Dream Academy – an organization for children of prisoners … “If the mountain was smooth you couldn’t climb it … Five black notes per scale on the piano and you can play almost any Negro Spiritual by playing just the black notes … Slave Ship Captain, John Newtown, penned the words for Amazing Grace after he became a Christian but the melody was based on the West African Sorrow Chant he heard rising from the belly of the slave ships he sailed …”
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Please be careful about rewriting history. Amazing Grace is built on the pentatonic scale and it MAY have been based on an African Sorrow Chant. To many it seems likely. But it is unknown. Anyway, the form does not matter. Rather it is the content of correction and redemption that matters.